young life. It is the tenement that gives up
the child to the street in tender years to find there the home it denied
him. Its exorbitant rents rob him of the schooling that is his one chance
to elude its grasp, by compelling his enrolment in the army of
wage-earners before he has learned to read. Its alliance with the saloon
guides his baby feet along the well-beaten track of the growler that
completes his ruin. Its power to pervert and corrupt has always to be
considered, its point of view always to be taken to get the perspective
in dealing with the poor, or the cart will seem to be forever getting
before the horse in a way not to be understood. We had a girl once at our
house in the country who left us suddenly after a brief stay and went back
to her old tenement life, because "all the green hurt her eyes so." She
meant just what she said, though she did not know herself what ailed her.
It was the slum that had its fatal grip upon her. She longed for its
noise, its bustle, and its crowds, and laid it all to the green grass and
the trees that were new to her as steady company.

From this tenement the street offered, until the kindergarten came not
long ago, the one escape, does yet for the great mass of children--a
Hobson's choice, for it is hard to say which is the most corrupting. The
opportunities rampant in the one are a sad commentary on the sure
defilement of the other. What could be expected of a standard of decency
like this one, of a household of tenants who assured me that Mrs. M----,
at that moment under arrest for half clubbing her husband to death, was "a
very good, a very decent, woman indeed, and if she did get full, he (the
husband) was not much." Or of the rule of good conduct laid down by a
young girl, found beaten and senseless in the street up in the Annexed
District last autumn: "Them was two of the fellers from Frog Hollow," she
said, resentfully, when I asked who struck her; "them toughs don't know
how to behave theirselves when they see a lady in liquor."

Hers was the standard of the street, the other's that of the tenement.
Together they stamp the child's life with the vicious touch which is
sometimes only the caricature of the virtues of a better soil. Under the
rough burr lie undeveloped qualities of good and of usefulness, rather,
perhaps, of the capacity for them, that crop out in constant exhibitions
of loyalty, of gratitude, and true-heartedness, a never-ending source of
encouragement