re is only one force that, to my mind, exerts an
even stronger influence upon the boys' lives especially; I mean the club,
of which I shall speak presently. But that comes at a later stage. The
kindergarten begins at the very beginning, and in the best of all ways,
with the children's play. What it does, counts at both ends on that tack.
Very soon it makes itself felt in the street and in what goes on there, as
anyone can see for himself by observing the children's play in a tenement
neighborhood where there is a kindergarten and again where there is none,
while by imperceptibly turning the play into work that teaches habits of
observation and of industry that stick, it builds a strong barrier against
the doctrine of the slum that the world owes one a living, which lies in
ambush for the lad on every grog-shop corner. And all corners in the
tenement districts are grog-shop corners. Beyond all other considerations,
beyond its now admitted function as the right beginning of all education,
whether of rich or poor, its war upon the street stands to me as the true
office of the kindergarten in a city like New York, with a tenement-house
population of a million and a quarter souls.[20] The street itself owns
it, with virtual surrender. Hostile as its normal attitude is to every new
agency of reform, the best with the worst, I have yet to hear of the first
instance in which a kindergarten has been molested by the toughest
neighborhood, or has started a single dead cat on a post-mortem career of
window-smashing, whether it sprang from Christian, Jewish, or heathen
humanity. There is scarce a mission or a boy's club in the city that can
say as much.

The kindergarten is no longer an experiment in New York. Probably as many
as a hundred are to-day in operation, or will be when the recently
expressed purpose of the Board of Education to make the kindergarten a
part of the public school system has been fully carried out. The
Children's Aid Society alone conducts a dozen in connection with its
industrial schools, and the New York Kindergarten Association nine, if its
intention of opening two new schools by the time this book is in the
printer's hands is realized. There is no theology, though there is a heap
of religion in most of them. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Theosophists,
and Ethical Culturists, if I may so call them, men of one or of various
opinions, or of none, concerning the hereafter, alike make use of the
kindergarten as