The Battle with the Slum - Chapters XIII-XIV



CHAPTER XIII.
JUSTICE TO THE BOY 

SOMETIMES, when I see my little boy hugging himself with delight at the 
near prospect of the kindergarten, I go back in memory forty years and 
more to the day when I was dragged, a howling captive, to school, as a 
punishment for being bad at home. I remember, as though it were yesterday, 
my progress up the street in the vengeful grasp of an exasperated servant, 
and my reception by the aged monster--most fitly named Madame Bruin--who 
kept the school. She asked no questions, but led me straightway to the 
cellar, where she plunged me into an empty barrel and put the lid on over 
me. Applying her horn goggles to the bunghole, to my abject terror, she 
informed me, in a sepulchral voice, that that was the way bad boys were 
dealt with in school. When I ceased howling from sheer fright, she took me 
out and conducted me to the yard, where a big hog had a corner to itself. 
She bade me observe that one of its ears had been slit half its length. It 
was because the hog was lazy, and little boys who were that way minded--
zip! she clipped a pair of tailor's shears close to my ear. It was my 
first lesson in school. I hated it from that hour.

   The barrel and the hog were never part of the curriculum in any 
American boy's school, I suppose; they seem too freakish to be credited to 
any but the demoniac ingenuity of my home ogre. But they stood for a 
comprehension of the office of school and teacher which was not patented 
by any day or land. It is not so long since the notion yet prevailed that 
the schools were principally to lock children up in for the convenience of 
their parents, that we should have entirely forgotten it. Only the other 
day a clergyman from up the state came into my office to tell of a fine 
reform school they had in his town. They were very proud of it.

   "And how about the schools for the good boys in your town?" I asked, 
when I had heard him out. "Are they anything to be proud of?"

   He stared. He guessed they were all right, he said, after some 
hesitation. But it was clear that he did not know.

   It is not necessary to go back forty years to find us in the metropolis 
upon the clergyman's platform, if not upon Madame Bruin's. A dozen or 
fifteen will do. They will bring us to the day when roof playgrounds were 
contemptuously left out of the estimates for an East Side school, as 
"frills" that had nothing to do with education; when the Board of Health 
found but a single public school in more, than sixscore that was so 
ventilated as to keep the children from being poisoned by foul air; when 
the authority of the Talmud had to be invoked by the Superintendent of 
School Buildings to convince the president of the Board of Education, who 
happened to be a Jew, that seventy-five or eighty pupils were far too many 
for one classroom; when a man who had been dead a year was appointed a 
school trustee of the Third Ward, under the mouldy old law surviving from 
the day when New York was a big village, and filled the office as well as 
if he had been alive, because there were no schools in his ward--it was 
the wholesale grocery district; when manual training and the kindergarten 
were yet the fads of yesterday, looked at askance; when fifty thousand 
children roamed the streets for whom there was no room in the schools, and 
the only defence of the School Commissioners was that they "didn't know" 
there were so many; and when we mixed truants and thieves in a jail with 
entire unconcern. Indeed, the jail filled the title rôle in the 
educational cast of that day. Its inmates were well lodged and cared for, 
while the sanitary authorities twice condemned the Essex Market school 
across the way as wholly unfit for children to be in, but failed to catch 
the ear of the politician who ran things unhindered. When (in 1894) I 
denounced the "system" of enforcing--or not enforcing--the compulsory 
education law as a device to make thieves out of our children by turning 
over their training to the street, he protested angrily; but the experts 
of the Tenement House Commission found the charge fully borne out by the 
facts. They were certainly plain enough in the sight of us all, had we 
chosen to see.

   When at last we saw, we gave the politician a vacation for a season. To 
say that he was to blame for all the mischief would not be fair. We were 
to blame for leaving him in possession. He was only a link in the chain 
which our indifference had forged; but he was always and everywhere an 
obstruction to betterment,--sometimes, illogically, in spite of himself. 
Successive Tammany mayors had taken a stand for the public schools when it 
was clear that reform could not be delayed much longer; but they were 
helpless against a system of selfishness and stupidity of which they were 
the creatures, though they posed as its masters. They had to go with it as 
unfit, and upon the wave that swept out the last of the rubbish came 
reform. The Committee of Seventy took hold, the Good Government Clubs, the 
Tenement House Commission, and the women of New York. Five years we strove 
with the powers of darkness, and look now at the change! The New York 
school system is not yet the ideal one,--it may never be; but the jail, at 
least, has been cast out of the firm. We have a compulsory education law 
under which it is possible to punish the parent for the boy's truancy, as 
he ought to be if there was room in the school for the lad, and he let him 
drift. And the day cannot be delayed much longer now when every child 
shall find the latchstring out on the school door. We have had to put our 
hands deep into our pockets to get so far, and we shall have to put them 
in deeper yet a long way. But it is all right. We are beginning to see the 
true bearing of things. Last week the Board of Estimate and Apportionment 
appropriated six millions of dollars for new schools--exactly what the 
battleship Massachusetts cost all complete with guns and fittings, so they 
told me on board. Battleships are all right when we need them, but even 
then it is the man behind the gun who tells, and that means the 
schoolmaster. The Board of Education asked for sixteen millions. They will 
get the other ten when we have caught our breath. Since the beginning of 
1895(1) we have built sixty-nine new public schools in Manhattan and the 
Bronx, at a cost of 12,038,764, exclusive of cost of sites, furnishings, 
heating, lighting, and ventilating the buildings, which would add two-
thirds at least of that amount, making it a round twenty millions of 
dollars. And every one of the sixty-nine has its playground, which will by 
and by be free to all the neighborhood. The idea is at last working 
through that the schools belong to the people, and are primarily for the 
children and their parents; not mere vehicles of ward patronage, or for 
keeping an army of teachers in office and pay.

   The silly old régime is dead. The ward trustee is gone with his friend 
the alderman, loudly proclaiming the collapse of our liberties in the day 
that saw the schools taken from "the people's" control. They were "the 
people." Experts manage our children's education, which was supposed, in 
the old plan, to be the only thing that did not require any training. To 
superintend a brickyard demanded some knowledge, but anybody could run the 
public schools. It cost us an election to take that step. One of the 
Tammany district leaders, who knew what he was talking about, said to me 
after it was all over: "I knew we would win. Your bringing those 
foreigners here did the business. Our people believe in home rule. We kept 
account of the teachers you brought from out of town, and who spent the 
money they made here out of town, and it got to be the talk among the 
tenement people in my ward that their daughters would have no more show to 
get to be teachers. That did the business. We figured the school vote in 
the city at forty-two thousand, and I knew we could not lose." The 
"foreigners" were teachers from Massachusetts and other states, who had 
achieved a national reputation at their work.

   There lies upon my table a copy of the minutes of the Board of 
Education of January 9, 1895, in which is underscored a report on a 
primary school in the Bronx. "It is a wooden shanty," is the inspector's 
account, "heated by stoves, and is a regular tinder box; cellar wet, and 
under one classroom only. This building was erected in order, I believe, 
to determine whether or not there was a school population in the 
neighborhood to warrant the purchase of property to erect a school on."

   That was the way then of taking a school census, and the result was the 
utter failure of the compulsory education law to compel anything. Today we 
have a biennial census, ordained by law, which, when at last it gets into 
the hands of some one who can count,(2) will tell us how many Jacob 
Beresheims are drifting upon the shoals of the street. And we have a 
truant school to keep them safe in. To it, says the law, no thief shall be 
committed. It is not yet five years since the burglar and the truant--
which latter, having been refused admission to the school because there 
was not room for him, inconsequently was locked up for contracting idle 
ways--were herded in the Juvenile Asylum, and classified there in squads 
of those who were four feet, four feet seven, and over four feet seven! I 
am afraid I scandalized some good people during the fight for decency in 
this matter, by insisting that it ought to be considered a good mark for 
Jacob that he despised such schools as were provided for him. But it was 
true. Except for the risk of the burglar, the jail was preferable by far. 
The woman into whose hands the management of the truant school fell, made 
out, after little more than a year's experience, that of twenty-five 
hundred so-called incorrigibles, the barest handful--scarce sixty--were 
rightly so named, and even these a little longer and tighter grip might 
probably win over. For such a farm school is yet to be provided. The rest 
responded promptly to an appeal to their pride. She "made it a personal 
matter" with each of them, and the truant vanished; the boy was restored. 
The burglar, too, made it a personal matter in the old contact, and the 
result was two burglars for one. I have yet to find any one who has paid 
attention to this matter and is not of the opinion that the truant school 
strikes at the root of the problem of juvenile crime. After thirty years 
of close acquaintance with the child population of London, Mr. Andrew 
Drew, chairman of the Industrial Committee of the School Board, declared 
his conviction that "truancy is to be credited with nearly the whole of 
our juvenile criminality." But for years there seemed to be no way of 
convincing the New York School Board that the two had anything to do with 
one another. Even now it seems to be a case of one convinced against his 
will being "of the same opinion still," for, though the Superintendent of 
Schools speaks of that bar to the jail as preposterously inadequate, 
nothing is done to strengthen it.

   Nothing on that tack. But there is a long leg and a short leg on the 
course, and I fancy Superintendent Snyder does the tacking on the long 
leg. Mr. Snyder builds New York's schools, and he does that which no other 
architect before his time ever did or tried; he "builds them beautiful." 
In him New York has one of those rare men who open windows for the soul of 
their time. Literally, he found barracks where he is leaving palaces to 
the people. If any one thinks this is overmeasure of praise, let him look 
at the "Letter H" school, now become a type, and see what he thinks of it. 
The idea suggested itself to him as meeting the demands of a site in the 
middle of a block, while he was poking about old Paris on a much needed 
vacation, and now it stands embodied in a dozen beautiful schools on 
Manhattan Island, copies, every one, of the handsomest of French palaces, 
the Hôtel de Cluny. I cannot see how it is possible to come nearer 
perfection in the building of a public school. There is not a dark corner 
in the whole structure, from the splendid gymnasium under the red tiled 
roof to the indoor playground on the street floor, which, when thrown into 
one with the two yards that lie enclosed in the arms of the H, give the 
children nearly an acre of asphalted floor to romp on from street to 
street; for the building sets right through the block, with just such a 
front on the other street as it shows on this one. If there be those yet 
upon whom the notion grates that play and the looks of the school should 
be counted in as educational factors, why, let them hurry up and catch on. 
They are way behind. The play through which the child "first perceives 
moral relations" comes near being the biggest and strongest factor in it 
all today; and as for the five or ten thousand dollars put in for "the 
looks" of things where the slum had trodden every ideal and every atom of 
beauty into the dirt, I expect to live to see that prove the best 
investment a city ever made.

   We are getting the interest now in the new pride of the boy in "his 
school," and no wonder. When I think of the old Allen Street school, with 
its hard and ugly lines, where the gas had to be kept burning even on the 
brightest days, recitations suspended every half-hour, and the children 
made to practice calisthenics so that they should not catch cold while the 
windows were opened to let in fresh air; of the dark playground 
downstairs, with the rats keeping up such a racket that one could hardly 
hear himself speak at times; or of that other East Side "playground" where 
the boys "weren't allowed to speak above a whisper," so as not to disturb 
those studying overhead, I fancy that I can make out both the cause and 
the cure of the boy's desperation. "We try to make our schools pleasant 
enough to hold the children," wrote the Superintendent of Schools in 
Indianapolis to me once, and added that they had no truant problem worth 
bothering about. With the kindergarten and manual training firmly 
ingrafted upon the school course, as they are at last, and with it 
reaching out to enlist also the boy's play through playground and vacation 
schools, I shall be willing to turn the boy who will not come in over to 
the reformatory. They will not need to build a new wing to the jail for 
his safekeeping.

   All ways lead to Rome. The reform in school building dates back, as 
does every other reform in New York, to the Mulberry Bend. It began there. 
The first school that departed from the soulless old tradition, to set 
beautiful pictures before the child's mind as well as dry figures on the 
slate, was built there. At the time I wanted it to stand in the park, 
hoping so to hasten the laying out of that; but although the Small Parks 
law expressly permitted the erection on park property of buildings for 
"the instruction of the people," the officials upon whom I pressed my 
scheme could not be made to understand that as including schools. Perhaps 
they were right. I catechised thirty-one Fourth Ward girls in a sewing 
school, about that time, twenty-six of whom had attended the public 
schools of the district more than a year. One wore a badge earned for 
excellence in her studies. In those days every street corner was placarded 
with big posters of Napoleon on a white horse riding through fire and 
smoke. There was one right across the street. Yet only one of the thirty-
one knew who Napoleon was. She "thought she had heard of the gentleman 
before." It came out that the one impression she retained of what she had 
heard was that "the gentleman" had two wives, both at one time probably. 
They knew of Washington that he was the first President of the United 
States, and cut down a cherry tree. They were sitting and sewing at the 
time almost on the identical spot on Cherry Hill where he lived when he 
held the office. To the question who ruled before Washington the answer 
came promptly: no one; he was the first. They agreed reluctantly, upon 
further consideration, that there was probably "a king of America" before 
his day, and the Irish damsels turned up their noses at the idea. The 
people of Canada, they thought, were copper-colored. The same winter I was 
indignantly bidden to depart from a school in the Fourth Ward by a trustee 
who had heard that I had written a book about the slum and spoken of "his 
people" in it.

   Those early steps in the reform path stumbled sadly over obstacles that 
showed what a hard pull we had ahead. I told in "The Making of an 
American" how I fared when I complained that the Allen Street school was 
overrun with rats, and how I went out to catch one of them to prove to the 
City Hall folk that I was not a liar, as they said. We won the fight for 
the medical inspection of the schools that has proved such a boon, against 
much opposition within the profession, from which we should have had only 
support. And this in face of evidence of a kind to convince anybody. I 
remember one of the exhibits. There had been a scarlet-fever epidemic on 
the lower West Side, which the health inspectors finally traced to the 
public school of the district. A boy with the disease had been turned 
loose before the "peeling" was over, and had achieved phenomenal 
popularity in the classroom by a trick he had of pulling the skin from his 
fingers as one would skin a cat. The pieces he distributed as souvenirs 
among his comrades, who carried them proudly home to show to their 
admiring playmates who were not so lucky as to sit on the bench with the 
clever lad. The epidemic followed as a matter of course. But though the 
Health Department put through that reform, when it came to inspecting the 
eyes of the children, we lost. The cry that it would "interfere with 
private practice" defeated us. The fact was easily demonstrated that not 
only was ophthalmia rampant in the schools with its contagion, but that 
the pupils were made both near-sighted and stupid by the want of proper 
arrangement of their seats and of themselves in their classrooms. But self-
interest prevailed. However, nothing is ever settled till it is settled 
right. I have before me the results of an examination of thirty-six public 
schools containing 55,470 pupils. It was made by order of the Board of 
Health this month (August, 1902), and ought to settle that matter for 
good. Of the 55,470, not less than 6670 had contagious eye-disease; 2328 
were cases of operative trachoma, 3243 simple trachoma, and 1099 
conjunctivitis. In one school in the most crowded district of the East 
Side 22.2 per cent were so afflicted. No wonder the doctors "were 
horrified" at the showing. So was the President of the Board of Health, 
who told me to-day that he would leave no stone unturned until effective 
inspection of the school children by eye-specialists had been assured. So 
we go, step by step, ever forward.

   Speaking of that reminds me of a mishap I had in the Hester Street 
school,--the one with the "frills" which the Board of Education cut off. I 
happened to pass it after school hours, and went in to see what sort of a 
playground the roof would have made. I met no one on the way, and, finding 
the scuttle open, climbed out and up the slant of the roof to the peak, 
where I sat musing over our lost chance, when the janitor came to close 
up. He must have thought I was a crazy man, and my explanation did not 
make it any better. He haled me down, and but for the fortunate chance 
that the policeman on the beat knew me, I should have been taken to the 
lockup as a dangerous lunatic--all for dreaming of a playground on the 
roof of a school-house.

   Janitor and Board of Commissioners to the contrary notwithstanding, the 
dream became real. There stands another school in Hester Street today 
within easy call, that has a roof playground where two thousand children 
dance under the harvest moon to the music of a brass band, as I shall tell 
you about hereafter--the joy of it to have that story to tell!--and all 
about are others like it, with more coming every year. To the indignant 
amazement of my captor, the janitor, his school has been thrown open to 
the children in the summer vacation, and in the winter they put a boys' 
club in to worry him. What further indignities there are in store for him, 
in this day of "frills," there is no telling. The Superintendent of 
Schools told me only yesterday that he was going to Boston to look into 
new sources of worriment they have invented there. The world does move in 
spite of janitors. In two short years our school authorities advanced from 
the cautious proposition that it "was the sense" of the Board of 
Superintendents that the schoolhouses might well be used in the cause of 
education as neighborhood centres, etc., (1897), to the flat declaration 
that "every rational system of education should make provisions for play" 
(1899). And to cut off all chance of relapse into the old doubt whether 
"such things are educational," that laid so many of our hopes on the dusty 
shelf of the circumlocution office, the state legislature has expressly 
declared that the commonwealth will take the chance, which Boards of 
Education shunned, of a little amusement creeping in. The schools may be 
used for "purposes of recreation." To the janitor it must seem that the 
end of all things is at hand.

   So the schools and their playgrounds were thrown open to the children 
during the long vacation, with kindergarten teachers to amuse them, and 
vacation schools tempted the little ones from the street into the cool 
shade of the classrooms. They wrought in wood and iron, they sang and they 
played and studied nature,--out of a barrel, to be sure; that came twice a 
week from Long Island filled with "specimens"; but later on we took a hint 
from Chicago, and let the children gather their own specimens on 
excursions around the bay and suburbs of the city. That was a tremendous 
success. And there is better still coming, as I shall show presently. It 
sometimes seems to me as if we were here face to face with the very thing 
we are seeking and know not how to find. The mere hint that money might be 
lacking to pay for the excursions set the St. Andrew's Brotherhood men on 
Long Island to devising schemes for inviting the school children out on 
trolley and shore trips. What if they all, the Christian Endeavor, the 
Epworth League, and the other expressions of the same human desire to find 
the lost brother, who are looking about for something to try their young 
strength and enthusiasm on--what if they were to hitch on here and help 
pull the load that may get mired else? They need men and women in that 
work. Mere paid teaching will never do it. If they can only get them, I 
think we may be standing upon the threshold of something which shall bring 
us nearer to a universal brotherhood than all the consecration and all the 
badges yet devised. I am thinking of the children and of the chance to 
take them at once out of the slum and into our hearts, while making of the 
public school the door to a house of citizenship in which we shall all 
dwell together in full understanding. Without out that door the house will 
never be what we planned. And there is the key, all ready-made, in the 
children.

   The mere contact with nature, even out of a barrel, brought something 
to those starved child lives that struck a new note. Sometimes it rang 
with a sharp and jarring sound. The boys in the Hester Street school could 
not be made to take an interest in the lesson on wheat until the teacher 
came to the effect of drought and a bad year on the farmer's pocket. Then 
they understood. They knew the process. Strikes cut into the earnings of 
Hester Street, small enough at the best of times, at frequent intervals, 
and the boys need not be told what a bad year means. No other kind ever 
occurs there. They learned the lesson on wheat in no time, after that. 
Oftener it was a gentler note that piped timidly in the strange place. A 
barrel of wild roses came one day, instead of the expected "specimens," 
and these were given to the children. They took them greedily. "I wondered,
" said the teacher, "if it was more love of the flower, or of getting 
something for nothing, no matter what." But even if it were largely the 
latter, there was still the rose. Nothing like it had come that way 
before, and without a doubt it taught its own lesson. The Italian child 
might have jumped for it more eagerly, but its beauty was not wasted in 
Jew-town, either. The baby kissed it, and it lay upon more than one wan 
cheek, and whispered, who knows what thought of hope and courage that were 
nearly gone. Even in Hester Street the wild rose from the hedge was not 
wasted.

   The result of it all was wholesome and good, because it was common 
sense. The way to fight the slum in the children's lives is with sunlight 
and flowers and play, which their child hearts crave, if their eyes have 
never seen them. The teachers reported that the boys were easier to 
manage, more quite, and played more fairly than before. The police reports 
showed that fewer were arrested or run over in the streets than in other 
years. A worse enemy was attacked than the trolley car or the truck. In 
the kindergarten at the Hull House in Chicago there hangs a picture of a 
harvest scene, with the man wiping his brow, and a woman resting at his 
feet. Miss Addams told me that a little girl with an old face picked it 
out among all the rest, and considered it long and gravely. "Well," she 
said, when her inspection was finished, "he knocked her down, didn't he?" 
A two hours' argument for kindergartens or vacation schools could not have 
put it stronger or better.

   It is five seasons since the Board of Education took over the work 
begun by the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor as an 
object lesson for us all, and I have before me the schedule for this 
summer's work, just begun. It embraces seventeen vacation schools in which 
the boys are taught basketry, weaving, chair-caning, sloyd, fret-sawing, 
and how to work in leather and iron, while the girls learn sewing, 
millinery, embroidering, knitting, and the domestic arts, besides sharing 
in the boys' work where they can. There are thirty-five school playgrounds 
with kindergarten and gymnasiums and games, and half a dozen of the play 
piers are used for the same purpose. In twelve open-air playgrounds and 
parks, teachers sent by the Board of Education lead the children's play, 
and in as many more public baths teach boys and girls to swim on alternate 
days. In Crotona Park, up in the Bronx, under big spreading oaks and 
maples, athletic meets are held of boys from down-town and up-town schools 
in friendly rivalry, and the Frog Hollow Gang, that wrecked railroad 
trains there in my recollection, is a bad memory. Over at Hudsonbank on 
the site of the park that is coming there, teams hired by the Board of 
Education are ploughing up the site of Stryker's Lane, and the young 
toughs of the West Side who held that the world owed them a living and 
collected it as they could, are turning truck farmers. They are planting 
potatoes, and gardening, and learning the secret of life that the living 
is his who can earn it. The world "do move." No argument is needed now to 
persuade those who hold the purse strings that all this is "good 
business." Instead, the mayor of the city is asking the Board of Education 
to tell him of more and better ways of putting the machinery to use. The 
city will foot the bill, if we will show them how. And we will show them 
how.

   The last four years have set us fifty years ahead, and there is no 
doubling on that track now. Where we had one kindergarten when I was put 
out of the Fourth Ward school by a trustee for daring to intrude there to 
find out what they were teaching, we have a hundred and fifteen at this 
writing in Manhattan alone, and soon we shall have as many as five hundred 
that are part of the public school in the greater city. "The greatest 
blessing which the nineteenth century bequeathed to little children," 
Superintendent Maxwell calls the kindergarten, and since the children are 
our own to-morrow, he might have said to all of us, to the state. The 
kindergarten touch is upon the whole system of teaching. Cooking, the only 
kind of temperance preaching that counts for anything in a school course, 
is taught in the girls' classes. A minister of justice declared in the 
Belgian Chamber that the nation was reverting to a new form of barbarism, 
which he described by the term "alcoholic barbarism," and pointed out as 
its first cause the "insufficiency of the food procurable by the working 
classes." He referred to the quality, not the quantity. The United States 
experts, who lately made a study of the living habits of the poor in New 
York, spoke of it as a common observation that "a not inconsiderable 
amount of the prevalent intemperance can be traced to poor food and 
unattractive home tables." The toasting-fork in Jacob's sister's hand 
beats preaching in the campaign against the saloon, just as the boys' club 
beats the police club in fighting the gang.

   The cram and the jam are being crowded out as common-sense teaching 
steps in and takes their place, and the "three H's," the head, the heart, 
and the hand,--a whole boy,--are taking the place too long monopolized by 
the "three R's." There was need of it. It had seemed sometimes as if, in 
our anxiety lest he should not get enough, we were in danger of stuffing 
the boy to the point of making a hopeless dunce of him. It is a higher 
function of the school to teach principles than to impart facts merely. 
Teaching the boy municipal politics and a thousand other things to make a 
good citizen of him, instead of so filling him with love of his country 
and pride in its traditions that he is bound to take the right stand when 
the time comes, is as though one were to attempt to put all the law of the 
state into its constitution to make it more binding. The result would be 
hopeless congestion and general uselessness.

   It comes down to the teacher in the end, and there are ten thousand of 
them in our big city.(3) To them, too, a day of deliverance has come. Half 
the machine teaching, the wooden output of our public schools in the past, 
I believe was due to the practical isolation of the teachers between the 
tyranny of politics and the distrust of those who had good cause to fear 
the politician and his work. There was never a more saddening sight than 
that of the teachers standing together in an almost solid body to resist 
reform of the school system as an attack upon them. There was no pretence 
on their part that the schools did not need reform. They knew better. They 
fought for their places. Throughout the fight no word came from them of 
the children's rights. They imagined that theirs were in danger, and they 
had no thought for anything else. We gathered then the ripe fruit of 
politics, and it will be a long while, I suppose, before we get the taste 
out of our mouths. But the grip of politics on our schools has been 
loosened, if not shaken off altogether, and the teacher's slavery is at an 
end, if she herself so wills it. Once hardly thought worthy of a day 
laborer's hire, she ranks to-day with a policeman in pay and privilege. 
The day that sees her welcomed as an honored guest in every home with a 
child in school will break the last of her bonds, and do more for the 
schools and for us than any one thing I can think of. Until that day comes 
the teachers, as a class apart, will have interests apart, or feel that 
they have, and will be bound to stand together to defend them; and they 
will work for pay. But for the real work of a teacher no one can ever pay 
her.

   The day is coming. The windows of the schoolhouse have been thrown 
open, and life let in with the sunlight. The time may be not far distant 
when ours shall be schools "for discovering aptitude," in Professor Felix 
Adler's wise plan. The problem is a vast one, even in its bulk; every year 
seats must be found on the school benches for twenty thousand additional 
children. In spite of all we have done, there are to-day in the greater 
city nearly thirty thousand children in half-day or part-time classes, 
waiting their chance. But that it can and will be solved no one can doubt. 
We have just got to, that is all.

   In the solution the women of New York will have had no mean share. In 
the struggle for school reform they struck the telling blows, and the 
credit of the victory was justly theirs. The Public Education Association, 
originally a woman's auxiliary to Good Government Club E, has worked as 
energetically with the school authorities in the new plan as it fought to 
break down the old and secure decency. It has opened many windows for 
little souls by hanging schoolrooms with beautiful casts and pictures, and 
forged at the same time new and strong links in the chain that bound the 
boy all too feebly to the school. At a time when the demand of the boys of 
the East Side for club room, which was in itself one of the healthiest 
signs of the day, had reached an exceedingly dangerous pass, the Public 
Education Association broke ground that will yet prove the most fertile 
field of all. The Raines law saloon, quick to discern in the new demand 
the gap that would divorce it by and by from the man, attempted to bridge 
it by inviting the boy in under its roof. Occasionally the girl went 
along. A typical instance of how the scheme worked was brought to my 
attention at the time by the head worker of the college settlement. The 
back room of the saloon was given to the club free of charge, with the 
understanding that the boy members should "treat." As a means of raising 
the needed funds, the club hit upon the plan of fining members ten cents 
when they "got funny."

   To defeat this device of the devil some way must be found; but club 
room was scarce among the tenements. The Good Government Clubs proposed to 
the Board of Education that it open the empty classrooms at night for the 
children's use. It was my privilege to plead their cause before the School 
Board, and to obtain from it the necessary permission, after some 
hesitation and doubt as to whether "it was educational." The Public 
Education Association assumed the responsibility for "the property," and 
the Hester Street school was opened. The property was not molested; only 
one window was broken that winter by a stray ball, and that was promptly 
paid for by those who broke it. But the boys who met there under Miss 
Winifred Buck's management learned many a lesson of self-control and 
practical wisdom that proved "educational" in the highest degree. Her plan 
is simplicity itself. Through their play,--the meeting usually begins with 
a romp,--in quarters where there is not too much elbow-room, the boys 
learn the first lesson of respecting one another's rights. The subsequent 
business meeting puts them upon the fundamentals of civilized society, as 
it were. Out of the debate of the question, Do we want boys who swear, 
steal, gamble, and smoke cigarettes? grow convictions as to why these 
vices are wrong that put "the gang" in its proper light. Punishment comes 
to appear, when administered by the boys themselves, a natural consequence 
of law-breaking, in defence of society; and the boy is won. He can 
thenceforward be trusted to work out his own salvation. If he does it 
occasionally with excessive unction, remember how recent was his 
conversion. "Resolved, that wisdom is better than wealth," was rejected as 
a topic for discussion by one of the clubs, because "everybody knows it 
is." This was in the Tenth Ward. If temptation had come that way in the 
shape of a pushcart with pineapples--we are all human! Anyway, they had 
learned the right.

   That was the beginning of a work of which we shall, I hope, hear a good 
deal more hereafter. It is all in its infancy yet, this attempt on the 
part of the municipality to get the boys off the street and out of the 
reach of the saloon. A number of schools were thrown open, where the 
crowds were greatest, for evening play and for clubs, and sometimes they 
laid hold of the youngster and sometimes not. It was a question again of 
the man or the woman who was at the helm. One school I found that surged 
with a happy crowd. It was over at Rivington and Suffolk streets, No. 160. 
Oh, how I wish they would soon stop this hopeless numbering of our 
schools, and call them after our great and good men, as Superintendent 
Maxwell pleads, so that "the name of every school may in itself be made a 
lesson in patriotism and good citizenship to its pupils." There they would 
be in their right place. One alderman got the idea during the Strong 
reform administration, but they hitched the names to the new parks instead 
of the schools, and that turned out wrong. So they have the Ham Fish Park 
for Hamilton Fish, the "Sewer" Park for William H. Seward, the Thomas 
Jefferson Park uptown which no one will ever call anything but the Little 
Italy Park, and the good name of De Witt Clinton put to the bad use of 
spoiling beautiful "Hudsonbank." Only, the effort will be wasted. The old 
name will stick. How different if the new schools had been called after 
these statesmen! And what a chance to get their pupils interested! In the 
"Alexander Hamilton School," for instance, where "the Grange" and his 
thirteen trees abide yet.

   But that is another story. I was thinking of the Jackson Pleasure Club 
of boys from eleven to thirteen which I found in session in No. 160, and 
of its very instructive constitution. I am going to print it here entire 
for the instruction of some good people who don't understand. The boys got 
it all up themselves with the help of a copy of the United States 
Constitution and the famous "Stamp Act."


CONSTITUTION OF THE JACKSON PLEASURE CLUB EVENING RECREATION CENTRE
P. S. NO. 160, NEW YORK CITY 

   We the boys of the J. P. C. in order to form a perfect club, we 
establish justice insure domestic tranquillity provide for the common 
defence. We promote the general welfare and secure the blessing of liberty 
to ourselves and our descendants to establish the Constitution for the J. 
P. C.

   No boys can be members who are less than thirteen years and must be 
from the 7th Grammar on.

   No member can be President or Vice President unless 6 months in club.

   All officers will keep their term six months.

   The officers can not commit a law until it is passed by the members. If 
it is an important one it will be passed by votes. By this I mean that if 
5/8; of the members pass it is passed if 1/2 is passed it is not passed.

   Several committees are appointed to look over these rules which seldom 
happen on the streets.

   If any member or officer is seen gambling, smoking or fighting a fine 
of 0.02 will be asked and must be paid the next meeting.

   Special meetings will be held each month. Meetings will be held at 8 
o'clock P.M. to 9 P.M.

   No secrets or slang language or nicknames allowed or a fine of $.03 is 
asked.

   If any body receites a recitation and makes a mistake he is not to be 
laughed at or a fine of $.02 must be paid.

   If any member takes the laws into his own hands and interferes with the 
president or any other officers or walks up and down the meeting room or 
draws pictures on the boards a fine of $.02 will be paid.

   Any one who is spoken to 3 times about order will be put out for that 
meeting.

   Amendment 1. No member will be allowed to go on a stranger's roof, or a 
fine of $.03 will be asked.

   Why not on a stranger's roof? Because flying kites, up there the boys 
run across and interfere with the neighbor's pigeons, which is apt to make 
him wroth. So you see it is all in the interests of "domestic tranquillity 
and the common defence." They are not meaningless phrases, those big 
words, they are the boy's ideas of self-government, of a real democracy, 
struggling through in our sight. And suppose he does walk on rhetorical 
stilts, he has precedent and will show it to you. A nation learned to walk 
on them. Who shall say they are not good enough for him?

   But to return to what I was speaking about: with the women to lead, the 
school has even turned the tables on the jail and invaded it bodily. For 
now nearly five years the Public Education Association has kept school in 
the Tombs, for the boys locked up their awaiting trial. Of thirty-one 
pupils on this school register, when I examined it one day, twelve were 
charged with burglary, four with highway robbery, and three with murder. 
That was the gang run to earth at last. Better late than never. The 
windows of their prison overlooked the spot where the gallows used to 
stand that cut short many a career such as they pursued. They were soberly 
attentive to their studies, which were of a severely practical turn. Their 
teacher, Mr. David Willard, who was a resident of the university 
settlement in its old Delancey Street home has his own sound view of how 
to head off the hangman. Daily and nightly he gathers about him, in the 
house on Chrystie Street where he makes his home, half the boys and girls 
of the neighborhood, whom he meets as their friend, on equal terms. Mr. 
Willard, though a young man, is one of the most unique personages in the 
city. He is now one of the probation officers, under the new law which 
seeks to save the young offender rather than to wreak vengeance upon him, 
and his influence for good is great. The house in Chrystie Street is known 
far and wide as "the Children's House." They have their clubs there, and 
their games, of which Willard is the heart and soul. "I never saw anything 
remarkable in him," said one of his old college professors to me; "if 
anything, he was rather a dull student." It seems, then, that even 
colleges are not always institutions for "discovering aptitude." It was 
reserved for Chrystie Street in Willard's case.

   Once a week another teacher comes to the Tombs school, and tells the 
boys of our city's history, its famous buildings and great men, trying so 
to arouse their interest as a first step toward a citizen's pride. This 
one also is sent by a club of women, the City History Club, which in five 
years has done strange things among the children. It sprang from the 
proposition of Mrs. Robert Abbe that the man and the citizen has his birth 
in the boy, and that to love a thing one must know it first. The half-
dozen classes that were started for the study of our city's history have 
swelled into many scores of times that number, with a small army of 
pupils. The pregnant fact was noted early by the teachers, that the 
immigrant boy easily outstrips in interest for his adopted home the 
native, who perchance turns up his nose at him, and later very likely 
complains of the "unscrupulousness" of the Jew, who forged ahead of him in 
business as well.

   The classes meet in settlement, school, or church to hear about the 
deeds of the fathers, and, when they have listened and read, go with their 
teachers and see for themselves the church where Washington worshipped, 
the graves where the great dead lie, the fields where they fought and 
bled. And when the little Italian asks, with shining eyes, "Which side 
were we on?" who can doubt that the lesson has sunk into a heart that will 
thenceforward beat more loyally for the city of his home? We have not any 
too much pride in our city, the best of us, and that is why we let it be 
run by every scalawag boss who comes along to rob us. In all the land 
there is no more historic building than Fraunces' Tavern, where Washington 
bade good-by to his officers; but though the very Chamber of Commerce was 
organized there, the appeal of patriotic women has not availed to save it 
to the people as a great relic of the past. The last time I was in it a 
waiter, busy with a lot of 'longshoremen who were eating their lunch and 
drinking their beer in the "Long Room," had hung his dirty apron on a 
plaster bust of the Father of his Country that stood upon the counter 
about where he probably sat at the historic feast. My angry remonstrance 
brought only an uncomprehending stare for reply.

   But in spite of the dullards, the new life I spoke of, the new sense of 
responsibility of our citizenship, is stirring. The People's Institute 
draws nightly audiences to the great hall of the Cooper Institute for the 
discussion of present problems and social topics--audiences largely made 
up of workingmen more or less connected with the labor movement. The 
"People's Club," an outgrowth of the Institute, offers a home for the 
lonely wage-earner, man or woman, and more accept its offer every year. It 
has now nearly four hundred members, one fourth of them women. Every night 
its rooms at 241 East Fourteenth Street are filled. Classes for study and 
recreation are organized right along. The People's University Extension 
Society invades the home, the nursery, the kindergarten, the club, 
wherever it can, with help and counsel to mothers with little children, to 
young men and to old. In a hundred ways those who but yesterday neither 
knew nor cared how the other half lived are reaching out and touching the 
people's life. The social settlements labor unceasingly, and where there 
was one a dozen years ago there are forty. Down on the lower East Side, 
the Educational Alliance conducts from the Hebrew Institute an energetic 
campaign among the Jewish immigrants that reaches many thousands of souls, 
two-thirds of them children, every day in the week. More than threescore 
clubs hold meetings in the building on Saturday and Sunday. Under the same 
roof the Baron Hirsch Fund teaches the children of refugee Jews the first 
elements of American citizenship, love for our language and our flag, and 
passes them on to the public schools within six months of their landing, 
the best material they receive from anywhere.

   So the boy is being got ready for dealing, in the years that are to 
come, with the other but not more difficult problems of setting his house 
to rights, and ridding it of the political gang which now misrepresents 
him and us. And justice to Jacob is being evolved. Not yet without 
obstruction and dragging of feet. The excellent home library plan that 
proved so wholesome in the poor quarters of Boston has only lately caught 
on in New York, because of difficulty in securing the visitors upon whom 
the plan depends for its success.(4) The same want has kept the boys' club 
from reaching the development that would apply the real test to it as a 
barrier against the slum. There are fifteen clubs for every Winifred Buck 
that is in sight. From the City History Club, the Charity Organization 
Society, from everywhere, comes the same complaint. The hardest thing in 
the world to give is still one's self. But it is all the time getting to 
be easier. There are daily more women and men who, thinking of the boy, 
can say, and do, with my friend of the college settlement, when an 
opportunity to enter a larger field was offered her, "No, I am content to 
stay here, to be ready for Johnnie when he wants me."

   Justice for the boy, and for his father. An itinerant Jewish glazier, 
crying his wares, was beckoned into a stable by the foreman, and bidden to 
replace a lot of broken panes, enough nearly to exhaust his stock. When, 
after working half the day, he asked for his pay, he was driven from the 
place with jeers and vile words. Raging and impotent, he went back to his 
poor tenement, cursing a world in which there was no justice for a poor 
man. If he had next been found ranting with anarchists against the social 
order, would you have blamed him? He found instead, in the Legal Aid 
Society, a champion that pleaded his cause and compelled the stableman to 
pay him his wages. For a hundred thousand such--more shame to us--this 
society has meant all that freedom promised: justice to the poor man. It 
too has earned a place among the forces that are working out through the 
new education the brighter day, for it has taught the lesson which all the 
citizens of a free state need most to learn--respect for law.

(1. Up to June, 1902)

(2. After two attempts that were not shining successes, the politicians at 
Albany and New York calmly dropped the matter, and for four years ignored 
the law. The Superintendent of Schools is at this writing (June, 1902) 
preparing to have the police take the child census, without which it is 
hard to see how he can know the extent of the problem he is wrestling 
with. Half-day classes are a fair index of the number of those anxious to 
get in; but they tell us nothing of the dangerous class who shun the 
schools)

(3. On May 31, 1902, there were 10,036 class teachers in elementary 
schools in the Greater New York, exclusive of principals and the 
nonteaching staffs, and of the high school teachers. With these, the total 
number was 11,570, with a register of 445,964 pupils)

(4. The managers of the New York Public Library have found a way, and have 
maintained twenty-seven home libraries during the past year (1901): little 
cases of from fifteen to forty books entrusted to the care of some family 
in the tenement. Miss Adeline E. Brown, who is in charge of the work, 
reports a growing enthusiasm for it. The librarian calls weekly. "We come 
very near to the needs of these families," she writes, "the visit meaning 
more to them than the books. In nearly every case we allow the books to be 
given out at any time by the child who glories in the honor of being 
librarian. In one wretched tenement, on the far East Side, we are told 
that the case of books is taken down into the yard on Sunday afternoon, 
and neighbors and lodgers have the use of them." It is satisfactory to 
know that the biggest of the home libraries is within stone's throw of 
Corlear's Hook, which the "Hook Gang" terrorized with rapine and murder 
within my recollection.
Miss Brown adds that "the girls prefer bookcases with doors of glass, as 
they like to scrub it with sapolio, but the boys are more interested in 
the lock and key.")



CHAPTER XIV.
The Band Begins to Play 
   
"NOTHING in this world of ours is settled until it is settled right." From 
the moment we began the fight for the children's play there was but one 
ending to that battle; but it did seem sometimes a long way off, never 
farther than when, just four months ago, the particular phase of it that 
had seemed to promise most was officially stamped as nonsense. The 
playgrounds on top of the big schoolhouses, which were to be the 
neighborhood roof-gardens of our fond imaginings, were "of little use," 
said the school committee that had them in charge. The people wouldn't go 
there. So, then, let them be given up. And a school commissioner with whom 
I argued the case on the way home responded indulgently that some of my 
notions "were regarded as Utopian," however sincerely held.

   Let me see, that was in May. The resolution I speak of had passed the 
Committee on Care of Buildings on April 18.(1) Today is the 20th of 
August, and I have just come home from an evening spent on one of those 
identical school-roofs under the electric lamps, a veritable fairyland of 
delight. The music and the song and laughter of three thousand happy 
children ring in my ears yet. It was a long, laborious journey up all the 
flights of stairs to that roof, for I am not as young as I was and 
sometimes scant of breath; but none sweeter did I ever take save the one 
under the wild-rose hedge I told of in "The Making of an American" when I 
went to claim my bride. Ah! brethren, what are we that we should ever give 
up, or doubt the justice of His fight who bade us let the little ones come 
unto Him and to clear the briers and thorns, that choked the path, from 
their way?

   Seven years we hacked away at the briers in that path. It is so long 
since the state made it law that a playground should go with every public 
school, five since as secretary of the Small Parks Committee I pleaded 
with the Board of Education to give the roof playground to the 
neighborhood after school hours. I remember that the question was asked 
who would keep order, and the answer, "The police will be glad to." I 
recalled without trouble the time when they had to establish patrol posts 
on the tenement roofs in defence against the roughs whom the street had 
trained to rebellion against law and order. But I was a police reporter; 
they were not. They didn't understand. The playschool came; the indoor 
playgrounds were thrown open evenings under the pressure they brought in 
their train. And at that point we took a day off, as it were, to 
congratulate one another on how wondrous smart and progressive we had 
been. The machinery we had started we let be, to run itself.

   It ran into the old rut. The janitor got it in tow, and presently we 
heard from the "play centres" that "the children didn't avail themselves" 
of their privileges. On the roof playground the janitor had turned the 
key. The Committee on Care of Buildings spoke his mind: "They were of 
little use; too hot in summer and too cold in winter." We were invited to 
quit our fooling and resume business at the old stand of the three R's, 
and let it go with that. That was what schools were for. It takes time, 
you see, to grow an idea, as to grow a colt or a boy, to its full size.

   President Burlingham, who in his day drew the bill that made it lawful 
to use the schools for neighborhood purposes other than the worship of 
those same three R's, went around with me one night to see what ailed the 
children who would not play.

   In the Mulberry Bend school the janitor had carefully removed the 
gymnastic apparatus the boys were aching for, and substituted four tables, 
around which they sat playing cards under the eye of a policeman. They 
were "educational" cards, with pictures of Europe and Asia and Africa and 
America on, but it required only half a minute's observation to tell us 
that they were gambling--betting on which educational card would turn up 
next. What the city had provided was a course in scientific gambling with 
the policeman to see that it was done right. And over at Market and Monroe 
streets, where they have an acre or more of splendid asphalted floor--such 
a ball room!--and a matchless yard, the best in the city, twoscore little 
girls were pitifully cooped up in a corner, being taught something, while 
outside a hundred clamored to get in, making periodic rushes at the door, 
only to encounter there a janitor's assistant with a big club and a roar 
like a bull to frighten them away. "Orders," he told us. The yard was dark 
and dismal. That was the school by the way, whence the report came that 
they "hadn't availed themselves" of the opportunity to play.

   It helped, when that story was told. There is nothing in our day like 
the facts, and they came out that time. There was the roof-garden on the 
Educational Alliance Building with its average of more than five thousand 
a day, young and old, last summer (a total of 344,424 for the season), in 
flat contradiction of the claim that the children "wouldn't go up on the 
roof." Not, surely, if it was only to encounter a janitor with a club 
there. But a brass band now? There were a few professional shivers at 
that, but our experience with the one we set playing in the park on 
Sunday, years ago, came to the rescue. When it had played its last piece 
to end and there burst forth as with one voice from the mighty throng, 
"Praise God from whom all blessings flow!" some doubts were set at rest 
for all time. They were never sensible, but after that they were silly.

   So the janitor was bidden bring out his key. Electric lights were 
strung. "We will save the money somewhere else," said Mayor Low. The 
experiment was made with five schools, all on the crowded East Side.

   I was at dinner with friends at the University Settlement, directly 
across from which, on the other corner, is one of the great new schools, 
No. 20, I think. We had got to the salad when through the open window 
there came a yell of exultation and triumph that made me fairly jump in my 
chair. Below in the street a mighty mob of children and mothers had been 
for half an hour besieging the door of the schoolhouse. The yell 
signalized the opening of it by the policeman in charge. Up the stairs 
surged the multitude. We could see them racing, climbing, toiling, 
according to their years, for the goal above where the band was tuning up. 
One little fellow with a trousers leg and a half, and a pair of suspenders 
and an undershirt as his only other garments, labored up the long flight, 
carrying his baby brother on his back. I watched them go clear up, 
catching glimpses of them at every turn, and then I went up after.

   I found them in a corner, propped against the wall, a look of the 
serenest bliss on their faces as they drank it all in. It was their show 
at last. The band was playing "Alabama," and fifteen hundred boys and 
girls were dancing, hopping, prancing to the tune, circling about and 
about while they sang and kept time to the music. When the chorus was 
reached, every voice was raised to its shrillest pitch: "Way--down--
yonder--in--the--cornfield." And for once in my life the suggestion of the 
fields and the woods did not seem hopelessly out of place in the Tenth 
Ward crowds. Baby in its tired mother's lap looked on wide-eyed, out of 
the sweep of the human current.

   The band ceased playing, and the boys took up some game, dodging hither 
and thither in pursuit of a ball. How they did it will ever be a mystery 
to me. There did not seem to be room for another child, but they managed 
as if they had it all to themselves. There was no disorder; no one was 
hurt, or even knocked down, unless in the game, and that was the game, so 
it was as it should be. Right in the middle of it, the strains of "Sunday 
Afternoon," all East Side children's favorite, burst forth, and out of the 
seeming confusion came rhythmic order as the whole body of children moved, 
singing, along the floor.

   Down below, the deserted street--deserted for once in the day--had 
grown strangely still. The policeman nodded contentedly: "good business, 
indeed." This was a kind of roof patrol he could appreciate. Nothing to 
do; less for to-morrow, for here they were not planning raids on the 
grocer's stock. They were happy, and when children are happy, they are 
safe, and so are the rest of us. It is the policeman's philosophy, and it 
is worth taking serious note of.

   A warning blast on a trumpet and the "Star-spangled Banner" floated out 
over the house-tops. The children ceased dancing; every boy's cap came 
off, and the chorus swelled loud and clear:

   "--in triumph shall wave 
   O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." 
 
The light shone upon the thousand upturned faces. Scarce one in a hundred 
of them all that did not bear silent witness to persecution which had 
driven a whole people over the sea, without home, without flag. And now--
my eyes filled with tears. I said it: I am getting old and silly.

   It was so at the still bigger school at Hester and Orchard streets. At 
the biggest of them all, and the finest, the same No. 177 where the 
janitor's assistant "shooed" the children away with his club, the once 
dismal yard had been festooned with electric lamps that turned night into 
day, and about the band-stand danced nearly three thousand boys and girls 
to the strains of "Money Musk," glad to be alive and there. A ball-room 
forsooth! And it is going to be better still; for once the ice has been 
broken, there are new kinks coming in this dancing programme that is the 
dear dissipation of the East Side. What is to hinder the girls, when the 
long winter days come, from inviting in the fellows, and papa and mamma, 
for a real dance that shall take the wind out of the sails of the dance-
halls? Nothing in all the world. Nor even will there be anything to stop 
Superintendent Maxwell from taking a turn himself, as he said he would, or 
me either, if I haven't danced in thirty years. I just dare him to try.

   The man in charge of the ball-room at No. 177--I shall flatly refuse to 
call it a yard--said that he didn't believe in any other rule than order, 
and nearly took my breath away, for just then I had a vision of the club 
in the doorway; but it was only a vision. The club was not there. As he 
said it, he mounted the band-stand and waved the crowd to order with his 
speaking-trumpet.

   "A young lady has just lost her gold watch on the floor," he said. "It 
is here under your feet. Bring it to me, the one who finds it." There was 
a curious movement of the crowd, as if every unit in it turned once about 
itself and bowed, and presently a shout of discovery went up. A little 
girl with a poor shawl pinned about her throat came forward with the 
watch. The manager waved his trumpet at me with a bright smile.

   "You see it works."

   The entire crowd fell in behind him in an ecstatic cake-walk, 
expressive of its joy and satisfaction, and so they went, around and 
around.

   On that very corner, just across the way, a dozen years ago, I gave a 
stockbroker a good blowing up for hammering his cellar door full of 
envious nails to prevent the children using it as a slide. It was all the 
playground they had.

   On the way home I stopped at the first of all the public schools to 
acquire a roof playground, to see how they did it there. The janitor had 
been vanquished, but the pedagogue was in charge, and he had organized the 
life out of it all. The children sat around listless, and made little or 
no attempt to dance. A harassed teacher was vainly trying to form the 
girls into ranks for exercises of some kind. They held up their hands in 
desperate endeavor to get her ear, only to have them struck down 
impatiently, or to be summarily put out if they tried again. They did not 
want to exercise. They wanted to play. I tried to voice their grievance to 
the "doctor" who presided.

   "Not at all," he said decisively; "there must be system, system!"

   "Tommyrot!" said my Chicago friend at my elbow, and I felt like saying 
"thank you!" I don't know but I did. They have good sense in Chicago. Jane 
Addams is there.

   The doctor resumed his efforts to teach the boys something, having 
explained to me that downstairs, where they are when it rains, there were 
seven distinct echoes to bother the band. Two girls "spieled" in the 
corner, a kind of dancing that is not favored in the playground. There had 
been none of that at the other places. The policeman eyed the show with a 
frown.

   So there was a fly in our ointment, after all. But for all that, the 
janitor is downed, his day dead. This of all things at last has been 
"settled right," and the path cleared for the children's feet, not in New 
York only, but everywhere and for all time. I, too, am glad to be alive in 
the time that saw it done.

(1. On the day it was published the newspapers reported the killing in the 
streets of three children by trucks)