bustle and stir at last, it is sometimes too long
delayed.

Another mischievous habit, characteristic of the American people,
preoccupied with so many urgent private concerns, is to rise up and pass a
law that is loudly in demand, and let it go with that, as if all social
evils could be cured by mere legal enactment. As a result, some of the
best and most necessary laws are dead letters on our statute books. The
law is there, but no one thinks of enforcing it. The beginning was made at
the wrong end; but we shall reach around to the other in season.

The chief end has been gained in the recognition of the child problem as
the all-important one, of the development of individual character as the
strongest barrier against the evil forces of the street and the tenement.
Last year I had occasion to address a convention at the National Capital,
on certain phases of city poverty and suffering, and made use of the magic
lantern to enforce some of the lessons presented. The last picture put on
the screen showed the open trench in the Potter's Field. When it had
passed, the Secretary of the Convention, a clergyman whose life has been
given to rescue work among homeless boys, told how there had just come to
join him in his work the man who had until very lately been in charge of
this Potter's Field. His experience there had taught him that the waste
before which he stood helpless at that end of the line, looking on without
power to check or relieve, must be stopped at its source. So he had turned
from the dead to the living, pledging the years that remained to him to
that effort.

It struck me then, and it has seemed to me since, that this man's position
to the problem was most comprehensive. The evidence of his long-range view
was convincing. Society had indeed arrived at the same diagnosis some time
before. Reasoning by exclusion, as doctors do in doubtful diseases, the
symptoms of which are clearer than their cause, it had conjectured that if
the "tough" whom it must maintain in idleness behind prison-bars, to keep
him from preying upon it, was a creature of environment, not justly to
blame, the community must be, for allowing him to grow up a "tough." So,
in self-defence, it had turned its hand to the forming of character in
proportion as it had come to own its failure to reform it. To that failure
the trench in the Potter's Field bore unceasing witness. Its claim to be
heard in evidence was incontestable.

Now that it has