n over fourteen who earn a large share of the money that pays for rent
and food, and the twenty-three thousand toddlers under six years, fully
one-third go to school. Deducting the two extremes, little more than a
thousand children of between six and fourteen years, that is, of school
age, were put down as receiving no instruction at the time the census was
taken; but it is not at all likely that this condition was permanent in
the case of the greater number of these. The poorest Hebrew knows--the
poorer he is, the better he knows it--that knowledge is power, and power
as the means of getting on in the world that has spurned him so long is
what his soul yearns for. He lets no opportunity slip to obtain it. Day
and night schools are crowded by his children, who are everywhere forging
ahead of their Christian school-fellows, taking more than their share of
prizes and promotions. Every synagogue, every second rear tenement or dark
back yard, has its school and its school-master with his scourge to
intercept those who might otherwise escape. In the census there are put
down 251 Jewish teachers as living in these tenements, a large number of
whom conduct such schools, so that, as the children form always more than
one-half of the population in the Jewish quarter, the evidence is after
all that even here, with the tremendous inpour of a destitute, ignorant
people, and with the undoubted employment of child labor on a large scale,
the cause of progress along the safe line is holding its own.

[Illustration: A SYNAGOGUE SCHOOL IN A HESTER STREET TENEMENT.]

[Illustration: THE BACKSTAIRS TO LEARNING. (Entrance to a Talmud School in
Hester Street.)]

It is true that these tenement schools that absorb several thousand
children are not what they might be from a sanitary point of view. It is
also true that heretofore nothing but Hebrew and the Talmud have been
taught there. But to the one evil the health authorities have recently
been aroused; of the other, the wise and patriotic men who are managing
the Baron de Hirsch charity are making a useful handle by gathering the
teachers in and setting them to learn English. Their new knowledge will
soon be reflected in their teaching, and the Hebrew schools become primary
classes in the system of public education. The school in a Hester Street
tenement that is shown in the picture is a fair specimen of its kind--by
no means one of the worst--and so is the back yard behind it, that se