sed that way;
which, happily, it cannot.

The immediate duty which the community has to perform for its own
protection is to school the children first of all into good Americans, and
next into useful citizens. As a community it has not attended to this duty
as it should; but private effort has stepped in and is making up for its
neglect with encouraging success. The outlook that was gloomy from the
point of view of the tenement, brightens when seen from this angle,
however toilsome the road yet ahead. The inpouring of alien races no
longer darkens it. The problems that seemed so perplexing in the light of
freshly-formed prejudices against this or that immigrant, yield to this
simple solution that discovers all alarm to have been groundless.
Yesterday it was the swarthy Italian, to-day the Russian Jew, that excited
our distrust. To-morrow it may be the Arab or the Greek. All alike they
have taken, or are taking, their places in the ranks of our social
phalanx, pushing upward from the bottom with steady effort, as I believe
they will continue to do unless failure to provide them with proper homes
arrests the process. And in the general advance the children, thus firmly
grasped, are seen to be a powerful moving force. The one immigrant who
does not keep step, who, having fallen out of the ranks, has been ordered
to the rear, is the Chinaman, who brought neither wife nor children to
push him ahead. He left them behind that he might not become an American,
and by the standard he himself set up he has been judged.

CHAPTER II.

THE ITALIAN SLUM CHILDREN

Who and where are the slum children of New York to-day? That depends on
what is understood by the term. The moralist might seek them in Hell's
Kitchen, in Battle Row, and in the tenements, east and west, where the
descendants of the poorest Irish immigrants live. They are the ones, as I
have before tried to show, upon whom the tenement and the saloon set their
stamp soonest and deepest. The observer of physical facts merely would
doubtless pick out the Italian ragamuffins first, and from his standpoint
he would be right. Irish poverty is not picturesque in the New World,
whatever it may have been in the Old. Italian poverty is. The worst old
rookeries fall everywhere in this city to the share of the immigrants from
Southern Italy, who are content to occupy them, partly, perhaps, because
they are no worse than the hovels they left behind, but mainly because
they ar