mentioning.

To a good many of the children, or rather to their parents, this latter
statement and the experience that warrants it must have a sadly familiar
sound. The Irish element is still an important factor in New York's
tenements, though it is yielding one stronghold after another to the
Italian foe. It lost its grip on the Five Points and the Bend long ago,
and at this writing the time seems not far distant when it must vacate for
good also that classic ground of the Kerryman, Cherry Hill. It is Irish
only by descent, however; the children are Americans, as they will not
fail to convince the doubter. A school census of this district, the Fourth
Ward, taken last winter, discovered 2,016 children between the ages of
five and fourteen years. No less than 1,706 of them were put down as
native born, but only one-fourth, or 519, had American parents. Of the
others 572 had Irish and 536 Italian parents. Uptown, in many of the poor
tenement localities, in Poverty Gap, in Battle Row, and in Hell's Kitchen,
in short, wherever the gang flourishes, the Celt is still supreme and
seasons the lump enough to give it his own peculiar flavor, easily
discovered through its "native" guise in the story of the children of the
poor.

The case of one Irish family that exhibits a shoal which lies always close
to the track of ignorant poverty is even now running in my mind, vainly
demanding a practical solution. I may say that I have inherited it from
professional philanthropists, who have struggled with it for more than
half a dozen years without finding the way out they sought.

There were five children when they began, depending on a mother who had
about given up the struggle as useless. The father was a loafer. When I
took them the children numbered ten, and the struggle was long since over.
The family bore the pauper stamp, and the mother's tears, by a transition
imperceptible probably to herself, had become its stock in trade. Two of
the children were working, earning all the money that came in; those that
were not lay about in the room, watching the charity visitor in a way and
with an intentness that betrayed their interest in the mother's appeal. It
required very little experience to make the prediction that, shortly, ten
pauper families would carry on the campaign of the one against society, if
those children lived to grow up. And they were not to blame, of course. I
scarcely know which was most to be condemned, when we tried