that must be improved if relief is to come. We have
the choice of hailing him man and brother or of being slugged and robbed
by him. It ought not to be a hard choice, despite the tatters and the
dirt, for which our past neglect is in great part to blame. Plenty of
evidence will be found in these pages to show that it has been made in the
right spirit already, and that it has proved a wise choice. No investment
gives a better return to-day on the capital put out than work among the
children of the poor.

A single fact will show what is meant by that. Within the lifetime of the
Children's Aid Society, in the thirty years between 1860 and 1890, while
the population of this city was doubled, the commitments of girls and
women for vagrancy fell off from 5,880 to 1,980, while the commitments of
girl thieves fell between 1865 and 1890 from 1 in 743 to 1 in 7,500.[2]
Stealing and vagrancy among boys has decreased too; if not so fast, yet at
a gratifying rate.

Enough has been written and said about the children of the poor and their
sufferings to make many a bigger book than this. From some of it one might
almost be led to believe that one-half of the children are worked like
slaves from toddling infancy, while the other half wander homeless and
helpless about the streets. Their miseries are great enough without
inventing any that do not exist. There is no such host of child outcasts
in New York as that. Thanks to the unwearied efforts of the children's
societies in the last generation, what there is is decreasing, if
anything. As for the little toilers, they will receive attention further
on. There are enough of them, but as a whole they are anything but a
repining lot. They suffer less, to their own knowledge, from their
wretched life than the community suffers for letting them live it, though
it, too, sees the truth but in glimpses. If the question were put to a
vote of the children to-morrow, whether they would take the old life with
its drawbacks, its occasional starvation, and its everyday kicks and hard
knocks; or the good clothes, the plentiful grub, and warm bed, with all
the restraints of civilized society and the "Sunday-school racket" of the
other boy thrown in, I have as little doubt that the street would carry
the day by a practically unanimous vote as I have that there are people
still to be found--too many of them--who would indorse the choice with a
sigh of relief and dismiss the subject, if it could be dismis