and delight to those who have made their cause their own and
have in their true sympathy the key to the best that is in the children.
The testimony of a teacher for twenty-five years in one of the ragged
schools, who has seen the shanty neighborhood that surrounded her at the
start give place to mile-long rows of big tenements, leaves no room for
doubt as to the influence the change has had upon the children. With the
disappearance of the shanties--homesteads in effect, however humble--and
the coming of the tenement crowds, there has been a distinct descent in
the scale of refinement among the children, if one may use the term. The
crowds and the loss of home privacy, with the increased importance of the
street as a factor, account for it. The general tone has been lowered,
while at the same time, by reason of the greater rescue-efforts put
forward, the original amount of ignorance has been reduced. The big loafer
of the old day, who could neither read nor write, has been eliminated to a
large extent, and his loss is our gain. The tough who has taken his place
is able at least to spell his way through "The Bandits' Cave," the pattern
exploits of Jesse James and his band, and the newspaper accounts of the
latest raid in which he had a hand. Perhaps that explains why he is more
dangerous than the old loafer. The transition period is always critical,
and a little learning is proverbially a dangerous thing. It may be that in
the day to come, when we shall have got the grip of our compulsory school
law in good earnest, there will be an educational standard even for the
tough, by which time he will, I think, have ceased to exist from sheer
disgust, if for no other reason. At present he is in no immediate danger
of extinction from such a source. It is not how much book-learning the boy
can get, but how little he can get along with, and that is very little
indeed. He knows how to make a little go a long way, however, and to serve
on occasion a very practical purpose; as, for instance, when I read
recently on the wall of the church next to my office in Mulberry Street
this observation, chalked in an awkward hand half the length of the wall:
"Mary McGee is engagd to the feller in the alley." Quite apt, I should
think, to make Mary show her colors and to provoke the fight with the
rival "feller" for which the writer was evidently spoiling. I shall get
back, farther on, to the question of the children's schooling. It is so
beset by l