WITHIN THE WALLS OF HOME.
One day a group of unusually intelligent wives of working men were driving through Central Park in a Park carriage. All were mothers, some of grown children, yet it was the first time that twelve of the twenty (all but two born in New York) had seen Central Park. Coming back on the east drive, the closed houses on Fifth Avenue attracted their attention. Various suggestions were made as to what use these houses could be put in the summer, when one woman, slight, delicate and extremely nervous, said: "I don't want anything in those houses but the room, just the room. I've never had all the room I want. I would have if I lived in them." After a moment she continued: "The reason we don't love each other as we should is because we don't have room; we crowd each other. All the time I lived in my father's home I was crowded. How we used to fight! Fight in the night, as well as the day, just because we did not have room. The beds were so crowded that one of the young ones had to sleep across the foot. The big ones would keep their feet up while they were awake, but when they went to sleep they would stretch out and kick the one across the foot. When I was so little that I slept that way, I used to lie awake in terror expecting the kick, and how I scratched when it came! I know we would have loved each other much more if we could have had room to grow up in, as the children in those houses do. And my mother! She didn't have a room to herself when she had the sickness that killed her."
YARD DAY AT THE SETTLEMENT.
It was pathetic to hear the revelations of the little miseries of childhood due to lack of room in the home. "My mother used to drive us out of the house to get a chance to sweep it," said another mother of children. "I remember lots of times standing down at the hall door, shivering, waiting for her to get through. I would go into the neighbors' rooms, but often they had got rid of their own children for the reason my mother had of hers."
"I tell you what used to make me mad; it was to have to wait for the others to get through eating," said another. "When I hire a place I always look first to see if the kitchen is big enough to pull the table from the wall and sit about it. I don't think I ever had any hot dinner when I was little, and it used to make me mad. When I had three children I moved just to get a large kitchen; it ain't near so nice a place, but the kitchen is big." There was not a woman there who did not have a grievance against her childhood because there was not room. One of them with crimson cheeks told how she remembered the sense of comfort that came to her after the death of an older sister because she had a bed to herself; she said it was a long time before she knew the cause, for she missed her sister's companionship, but she was more comfortable; she enjoyed having the five nails at the foot of the bed for her own clothes. The woman who spoke first interrupted: "I never in my life had even a hook in the wall that was my own until I was married. We were so near of a size we could wear each other's things, and we did. The one who was quickest got the best of that size. You never knew whose clothes you'd have to put on in the morning. I'll never have but this child. She likes me. She hates being pushed and crowded. She has a bed and bureau of her own. Never, never until my husband can pay more rent will we have another child." She paid the penalty of death for this determination.
As one thinks of the number of human beings with all their belongings crowded into the floor space of a tenement-house home, the marvel at the endurance grows greater. Think of its limitations of conveniences!
To those who know the limitations of a tenement-house home, the criticisms and suggestions that the superficially informed reformers make on and for the hygienic management of these homes are at once the source of amusement and indignation. When stress is laid on airing a bed every morning, and one in imagination sees the only windows in another room with a breakfast table between them, a room already overcrowded with things, the only room for the mother and baby during the process, one wonders what the speaker would do under the same circumstances. Then when the horrors of dust are revealed and the necessity of keeping the floors clean by frequent washing is made to be imperative, one sees the bed that just fits between the walls at the head and foot, with half of its own space free in front of it, and again comes the question, what would the expert do living under like circumstances? What is needed everywhere is scientific knowledge in conjunction with intimate knowledge of the evils inseparable from the small dark rooms of even the best tenements, and then we will have suggestions that the woman can use—can apply to her own family conditions—who must do the work for a family within this space.
In the best of the tenements it will be found that where the tenants can afford a parlor, access to it is across the kitchen, where all the work of the family must be done. It will be seen at once the disadvantage at which the house-mother is when friends who are not intimate call. Nothing stands between her and the outer world but the door into a public hallway. The bedrooms admit of a bed, and sometimes, but only in the exceptional bedroom, a bureau. This is usually found in the parlor, if there is one, and in it all the clothes that can be folded, all the little accessories belonging to the family; to this, however, all must have access. If there is a closet for clothes, or if the family can own and house a wardrobe, it is usually in this room, and the common convenience of the family. The bedrooms, dark, offer no space for a washstand. The kitchen is the common wash-room. The kitchens of the tenement houses built in these later years are a marvel of inconvenience. The dish closet is a few shelves up near the ceiling, the lower one of which can be reached by a woman five feet four standing on the soles of her feet; a chair is necessary to reach the other shelves. Beneath this space is the pot closet, or it may be the stationary tubs, the top of which provides table space for cooking conveniences.
THE CHILDREN'S HOUR AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.
There comes to mind now one of the best plans for a tenement having four families on each floor on the East Side. The stairways are lighted by a window on each landing opening on an air shaft, and on each floor is a lavatory with a large window. Each suite consists of four rooms. The parlor has two windows on the street; a kitchen window opening into the parlor, never raised if the family have social standards; and a window on a large air shaft, or space between the two houses, on which the bedroom windows, which are large, open. The rent for these four rooms is seventeen dollars per month, and they are on the fifth floor. The kitchens in this house have been described. The family have to sit at three sides of the table; there is no room to pull it from the wall; even then one side is uncomfortably near the stove. The only space except the parlor for a refrigerator is in the bedroom. As there are three young wage-earners supporting the home, who are social, who are encouraged by the widowed mother to have their friends in their own home, this is not to be tolerated. The refrigerator is in the bedroom. It was in that room when it was occupied for four years by a girl dying of tuberculosis. Is it any wonder that the fight against this disease is again being waged in that family? Yet it is above the average of its class in intelligence, as the apartments are above the average in the region.
The very elementary necessity of space and place for privacy in taking a bath is exceptional. For space, place and light are necessary. A very bright woman, perfectly familiar with the limitations of the tenement-house homes, once said to the writer: "The truth is they cannot be clean if they are decent." A cruel truth which was brought forcibly to the remembrance of the writer one winter afternoon in an East Side home, where a mother was trying to bring up a family to the best of her ability. When the caller went into the living-room of the family a tub stood at the side of the stove, in which was the youngest daughter, a girl about eight; a brother of ten and his boy friend of twelve or fourteen years were playing checkers on the other side of the room. The mother was ironing. There was no consciousness of embarrassment shown by the children. The mother was ashamed, not at the exposure, but at being found out in permitting such an exposure. She was a member of a club where the training of children was a constant theme. The necessity of physical cleanliness, its relation to health, she had grasped, and her children profited by it. The relation between privacy and morals she had not grasped. It was as though a veil had fallen from her eyes as she looked at her daughter of eight standing naked before the two boys. Whether such a thing ever occurred again the caller does not know; that the mother never forgave the caller for finding her out she does know. The family had three bedrooms, but none would permit the placing of a washstand in them. One was the passageway from front to rear, for the family occupied a floor, but could afford only one fire.
Privacy is almost impossible in the tenement-house home. One bedroom is usually the passageway to the next, if there are two, or both bedrooms are passageways from front to rear of the home, and must be used by all the family. Privacy is impossible in these rooms, and there are thousands of just such apartments. Children must grow up in them subject to the limitations, restrictions and exposures their walls compel. This division of space must fix standards of reserve, of privacy, of social life. No amount of love, not even of intelligence, can save the children from the evils such division of space imposes on family life. It deadens the sensibilities. The insidious effects of this is not always realized, even by the intelligent parents who accept them as inevitable.
One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry at the inconsistencies of the standards of those who go to Albany to secure the passage of bills for the betterment of the conditions of the working people. We have secured a law compelling separate closets for men and women in stores and factories, a righteous measure in the interest of morality. But the closets in the tenements must be used by men, women and children of several families. A neighborly courtesy is the loaning of the key, to save a neighbor a journey upstairs. Children run in from the street, several at a time, for it is the only place provided. This publicity and freedom is the crying evil of the tenements, the one from which tragedies come. The marvel is that so few follow; that in spite, seemingly in defiance, of it all, characters develop that are beautiful, harmonious, true.
Can one condemn the girl facing the worst that can befall her who under pressure that her appeal justifies, yes, makes necessary, confides that her relations with the man who is the father of the coming child began when each were little things six or eight years old? A relation that grew out of lack of privacy, the intimacy forced by tenement-house conditions. Both families have gone far beyond their social position at the time these two were children, but the blasting of innocency has left its burning scar on the girl, and she must bear it alone.
Perhaps it is this necessarily open living that gives the love-making in the tenement region a character peculiarly its own. When interest between the sexes is aroused, it is expressed so frankly and publicly. There are times when restraint would seem to improve manners; but among the working young men and women one is constantly reminded of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. How frankly and unconsciously they must have shown their interest in each other, and how unconsciously they must have revealed their interest in each other to all the other breathing creatures. Perhaps nothing about the love-making is more interesting than that numbers add to the enjoyment of both lovers. Nothing adds more to the happiness of a wage-earning girl than to have her "chum" deeply interested in and deeply interesting to a young man at the same time she is. It seems to be conceded that two couples can have so much more pleasure than one. The terms applied by these young people to each other will reveal their social level in the wage-earning world. If the term "steady" is used where the world of wealth and leisure would use fiancé, the under wage-earning world is reached. If "friend" is used, the social ladder covered by that word, used in that sense, has many rounds. Knowing many working girls who would use the term "friend" when referring to the man they had accepted as a future husband, or who would in time hold that relation, the writer was constantly impressed by the unconscious protection the girls threw about each other. One would rarely hear of plans made that did not include two beside the couple engaged, or willing to be. Sometimes two girls were to complete the party. It is evident that the more means the merrier time. In every group of girls there will be two or three who cause anxiety; two or three whose influence, unchecked, may lead to trouble. It is not easy to restrain the young people, for so often the offenses are so naturally the result of environment that to speak directly of them would be most unwise. The chances are that reference to them would put the speaker in the position of possessing knowledge of an undesirable kind; it would seem to suggest evil. Often it would be a moral shock to many working girls to have their actions criticised from the impression their freedom makes before the cause is understood.
MUTUAL INTERESTS.
A young girl joined a club for young people. From the first she caused anxiety. Her face was innocent and attractive, but her actions with young men were just the reverse. At last it became necessary to speak to her. It was evident that she attributed the criticism to what she termed "fussiness." Not the least modification in her manner followed. At last, after many interviews, she was told that she would never be spoken to again. If she offended in the club-room once more, she would be given her hat. That would mean that she was not to again enter those rooms. She confided to her intimate friend that no one had ever told her that what she did was wrong. After this interview, a modification of her manner was noticed, not because she was convinced she was wrong, but because she thought it wise to heed. A group of young people were returning from a picnic. Just after the homeward journey had begun, it was seen that this young girl was sitting in the lap of a young man whom she had always known; as children they lived for years in the same tenement. Beside him sat the young girl whom he had invited to the club picnic. The club girl sat so unconscious of any infringement of manners, public or private, that a young man who had grown up under the same conditions was asked what he thought of the act. He started at once to tell the girl to stand up, but was restrained. Evidently he was shocked, and the act was wrong from his standpoint, the only standpoint fair to the girl. A seat was made for the girl elsewhere, who, for the first time, showed distress, or rather anxiety, because of her own acts. Nothing was said to her.
Occasion was made to speak to the young man who had kept his seat and let the girl sit in his lap. He was a working man, and his hands showed it. All his life of twenty-two years he had lived under tenement-house conditions.
"Frank, would you marry a girl who sat in a man's lap in a railroad train?" he was asked.
"No," he responded indignantly.
"Do you suppose you are the only man in the world who has that feeling? What right have you to let any girl cheapen herself so that the man who saw her with you, doing what you permitted, if you did not suggest and encourage, would not marry her?"
The man's face grew white. He had a sister of whom he was very fond and very proud.
"What would you do to the man who permitted your sister, when she was tired, to do what you permitted a girl to do to-night—a girl who has no brother to watch over her?"
The young man was six feet tall. He rose to his feet, and, raising his hands toward the starlit sky, he said:
"As true as there is a God above me, I will never while I live let any girl do what I am not willing my own sister should do anywhere."
After a moment's quiet, the chaperon said:
"I shall never mention this to the girl. I hold you responsible. You are stronger mentally, morally and physically, and are wholly to blame." Whether he spoke to the girl or not, no one knows, but never again was it necessary to even mentally criticise that young girl's manners with young men. Not only did her manners change, but the expression of her face. One grew to love and trust her, and ask her help for other girls.
The chivalry of the working boys and young men is constantly seen, unconsciously revealed. Sometimes it is dangerous the degree in which it shows itself among the finest of the boys. A sick girl, unable to go out, will command attentions so special and direct that the fear of her misunderstanding, and suffering because she has not understood, will make those interested who know the danger unhappy; sympathy from any cause will make a great-hearted working boy place himself in a position where he may be easily misunderstood.
It is astonishing how long the spirit of childhood will live in working boys and girls, even under conditions that seem never to justify happiness and spontaneity!
One Sunday a group of working men and girls went nutting, being duly and properly chaperoned. Four of the young men climbed a big walnut tree. The girls, with some of the young men, were gathered at the foot, waiting for the shower of nuts. The chaperon sat on a stone fence a little way off. The wind began to blow, swaying the top branches. One of the young men having a good voice laid himself along a limb high from the ground, singing "Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top." The others took it up and the girls joined in. Over and over it was sung. Then the girls and boys on the ground joined hands outside the span of the tree and sang "Ring around a rosy." Every singing game of childhood was enthusiastically played. Every one of these young people were poor as the world counts wealth—every one over eighteen—all had worked from the first moment they could earn wages. Each one had suffered the wearing anxiety of no wages when the family needed what they could earn, and yet they sang—they felt like children. No amount of money at the time could have bought them this happiness.
The sun poured down a glory of yellow light on the trees that seemed to have caught its color dashed with red flames. Across the field came one of the girls slowly—a girl who never had manifested any enthusiasm, except for dancing; who never gave expression to any emotion of feeling. It was thought impossible to move her. As she came nearer, it was seen that she was deeply stirred; her face was expressive. Putting her head against the arm of the chaperon, she whispered, rather than spoke: "I did not know trees were any color but green before." The tears were chasing each other down her cheeks, while her mouth was wreathed with smiles. The girl was over twenty. Had she been born in a family that would use the privileges of the various Fresh-Air organizations, she would have known more of the country. It was this year that she first saw the stars over the trees, and the moon at the full in the sky when it had a horizon. Obedience to her was not easy, but to her brother she gave it willingly; he had been her nurse in babyhood, her friend and companion in childhood, and was now her protector. In every plan of these young people he considered his sister first. If she had an escort, he invited some other girl to go with him; if not, he took his sister. The girl never manifested any interest in young men beyond their ability to dance well. She would find a dozen reasons for not dancing if she found herself on the floor with an awkward dancer.
This group of twenty-two young men and women, all from homes that would bar the door to charity, even when suffering, were fairly representative of the social standard of the better part of the wage-earning world of New York. Among them was the independent girl, the one who had no desire to be sought in marriage; she saw the worries of her sisters married to men having small and uncertain wages; saw the wearing side of motherhood rather than its joys. She skillfully kept her young men friends as friends, changing from one to the other as soon as she saw the line of friendship being crossed. The girl who never won attention till she wooed it was among them; the girl who was treated discourteously or neglected was one of them. The girl who was sought for exhibition because she dressed well, yet who never roused any deeper feeling, was there, for some of the men were very observant, and had standards of style for the girls they escorted.
THE FOREST OF THE TENEMENTS.
There was the young man who willfully played with a girl's feelings; the young man who openly exhibited the love he had awakened, but to which he did not respond; the girl whose adoration received indifferent treatment, yet who was never entirely cast aside by the man too selfish to marry. In that company there was one couple who were sentimental in their actions; they would sit and hold hands, if permitted, rather than dance. As soon as it was discovered that their actions were influencing others, they were given the choice to restrain the expression of their affection in public completely or resign. The lesson was effectual. When it was seen that one of the young men was very deeply interested in one of the young women, that she was only semi-conscious of his interest, yet enjoyed it, while not at all interested in him, just a few words, pointing out how unkind it was to permit his interest to develop and how unfair to let him spend money for her when she never meant to hold any relation but that of friend, changed her attitude toward him. She made the young man understand her position. More than that, she gave her lesson to the other girls, and escorts were changed frequently; groups arranged to go to the theater instead of couples. As one girl put it, "We don't want any nonsense." Yet several marriages have occurred among these members, the new homes making centers of social interest for the others. The babies are objects of deepest interest to all, and it is a lesson to see the ease and freedom with which even the young men will hold them. Much is said of the "little mothers," but the "little fathers" are as unselfish and devoted a part of the family life in the tenements as the little mothers. When a great, strong young man picks up a baby with the ease of a woman, is interested in its ills of the moment, one is grateful for the hours that, as a child, he spent as nurse; sees the beauty of strength and tenderness, and the humanizing effect of the maternal in the character of a boy whose character must be molded by the environment of a tenement-house region.
The rapidity with which a complete change of standard of manners can be attained amazed those who watched these young people. Outdoor life was possible to them only on Sunday. When first the trips on the railroad began, the noise, freedom, constant changing of seats mortified those who chaperoned the group. The journeys began in the spring. One Sunday evening in November, when returning from a nutting party, a group of young people entered the car laughing, pushing, slapping one another. The young men and women who had been going to the country almost every Sunday for the summer looked in amazement at one another, and with very evident disapproval at the new group. Yet they had offended, if offense can be committed in perfect innocence, in just that way many times a few months before. It is this adaptability, this quickness of comprehension of the little things, that give the outward stamp, that make the American wage-earning young people so intensely interesting, so wonderful in social achievement.
These young people were all Americans, of Christian parentage, as the word means, not Hebrews. The young women worked in shops with girls of Hebrew parentage. There were deep race antagonisms, due to many causes, but principally to the willingness of the Hebrews to accept any wages and work anywhere and any number of hours. These American girls grew to have the deepest sympathy with the girls of Hebrew birth when they found that many Hebrew parents coerced, while all regulated, the marriage of their daughters. That parents would dare to assume such authority in so personal a matter as marriage aroused the most extravagant terms of condemnation. One listening could well believe the hopelessness of trying to make one of these girls marry against her will.
No greater contrast could be conceived than the entire independence of these girls in their social relations, which they did not view as a privilege but considered a right. Beyond the fact that some of them must be at home at ten or half-past, there was no law but their own will. This freedom is one of the most serious influences in the life of working girls in New York. Were it not for their common sense and the knowledge of life thrust on them when children, the effect would be most disastrous for the country. As it is, in certain ways young men and women retain the frankness of childhood in their intercourse. One realizes what perfect equality between the sexes is when mingling freely with them. Doubtless this comes from playing in the street together from earliest childhood, with no favors asked or conceded because one is a girl, and the impossibility of privacy. This last is the saddest fact in the life of tenement-house children.
At the lower rounds of the social ladder in the wage-earning world the mother and baby are inseparable, if the mother does not drink. Night and day the baby is cared for, often in hopeless ignorance, but cared for. Often everything else is neglected. When the baby sleeps, the mother is too tired to work, too indifferent. When awake, the baby insists on being held. One is frequently reminded of the story of the woman whose moan when her baby died was: "What excuse can I give John now?" Yet the day that baby is able to walk alone on the street the mother loosens her hold. The baby finds its freedom limited only by its ability to remain upright, and to return to its home for meals and at night. "Throw me the key and a piece of bread," is often the extent of its demands from the sidewalk. True, the mother knows every woman in the block will be, in an emergency, a mother. The child learns to care for itself; it makes less and less demands on the mother, who may even now have another baby compelling all her thought and time. Above this scale, where home-making assumes importance, the child remains longer under the mother's care; is watched when on the street by glances from the window; is sent to school, and some oversight maintained over its school life; but the wage-earning period means emancipation from oversight often even at this level. Hundreds of girls start out and find work for the first time without any evident responsibility on the part of even good mothers. No amount of familiarity with this exercise of freedom deadens the horror of it to the outsider. Women, mothers of attractive daughters, will not know the street on which the daughters work. After one of the most disastrous fires in New York, in which many working girls perished, four mothers notified the police the next day that their daughters had disappeared. It was the failure to trace the girls and the advertising of their disappearance that led, through companions who had escaped from the building, to the awful conclusion that these four had perished in the flames.
Sometimes it would be difficult for a mother to go to the place where the daughter finds employment; but here, as in everything else in life, that which is deemed the more important receives attention. Perhaps it is the habit of trust, or indifference, that governs mothers' activities.
A girl will make intimate friendships unhindered, unguided by mothers who act up to the measure of their comprehension of the duties of a mother. Girls are admitted to the homes who are unknown outside of the workshop; they work with the daughter; no other background is known. The mother knows that other mothers are accepting her daughters on the same basis of knowledge. For their young men friends there may be, but as frequently there will not be, any greater sense of responsibility than for the girl friends. In homes where the income would seem to demand a sense of social responsibility it is found wanting, and young people come and go unhindered. If there are two or more young wage-earners in the family, their conversation may bring knowledge of what they are doing, where they are going. But they also make compacts at concealments of disobedience where there are laws to be obeyed.
THE CHILDREN'S PLAYGROUND.
The world has been shocked by the tragedies of death and disgrace that came to the homes of two young working girls within the past year. In each case the father and mother had gone to bed with the daughters out in the night, where they did not know; one a girl of eighteen, the other less. The "cadet" system would never exist were the parents of every girl alert to train and guard her the more closely because she was a working girl.
Until by some direct process the control of daughters and of sons is made desirable, and then natural in the wage-earners' homes, the problem of family life in the tenements will remain unsolved. It is a question sometimes whether, and sometimes it is very evident, that by the giving up of wages to the parents the freedom of the workers, even though but children, from obedience and parental oversight is purchased.
Those who know working girls know how high is the average of morality. Years will go by in intimate relations with the same group of girls and no tragedy will mar it; no echo of tragedy among their friends. The hardness with which even the suggestion of looseness is treated in any group of working girls is simply an expression of self-preservation. A group of sixty girls, earning the lowest wages and living under the worst conditions, were watched five years and one girl fell. As one goes over her history from birth, any other result would seem a miracle. A girl arrested gave the first name and address of one of the girls in this factory. The case was reported in the papers. By an unfortunate circumstance, the working girl living at that number was away from the factory two days at this time. When she learned of the connection that had been made because of the chance use of her Christian name and her address, she told a lie as to where she was at the time of that arrest. The other girls struck until she was discharged. The girl was innocent of everything but the lie; investigation proved this. The girls would not recede from their position; work had to be found for the girl elsewhere. She was publicly marked. They could not convince everybody of her innocence; lots of people believed the story, and they would not work with her; go back and forth with her.
A room was hired as a lunch-room for these girls. They brought their own lunches and paid a small amount of dues, which were used to pay for tea served daily. The projectors of this little enterprise were girls of wealth and social position; three were at the lunch-room every day. By representing themselves as friends of the projectors to the caretaker, two representatives of a "yellow journal" gained access to the room. One, a woman, engaged the caretaker in conversation for some time in the hall, getting all the information she could give her. The Sunday edition of that paper contained an illustration of the room filled with wretched-looking girls, while young women holding up trailing skirts were passing cups. The text was as far from the truth as the picture. The working girls absolutely refused to go to the lunch-room again. At last they agreed that if the paper would publish a true account—that they provided their own lunches and paid dues, and waited on themselves—they would go back. The paper refused. Two of those girls would never enter the rooms again.
The working girl has suffered quite as much at the hands of yellow journalism as the woman of wealth and social position. Not one of these girls went to school until she was fourteen; nor during any year since she began working had she earned on an average more than $3.50 per week. Yet they had social standards to maintain, and compelled recognition of them by those who opened opportunities to them.
The inspiring fact remains that the standard of home life in ethics, as in necessities, is raising. Without doubt much of this is due to the improvement in the class of readers used in our public schools. They are not perfect in the matter of selection, but they carry messages to the hearts, as well as the heads, of the children, few of whom would pass an examination on their contents. Even the primary grades introduce the children to the best thoughts of all time, and the crumbs, at least, are carried to the homes.
The girls who belong to the working-girls' club carry with them everywhere the influence that is molding their characters to a brighter type of American womanhood. The Settlements soon become centers of education through the social activities they make possible to the people. They surpass the clubs in this, that boys and girls, young men and women, each have in them the center that makes possible social occasions that are within their means and under rightful guides; together men and women are trained socially. The Settlements have been in existence long enough to have the children that were the first friends of the Residents now the fathers and mothers of children. The years of contact show results in the homes established, in the kind of care and the ambitions held for the children still babies. Wages have not greatly changed from those earned by the fathers of these new home-makers; but money represents different values. The kindergarten is the first thing demanded for their children, and the seeds sown in the minds of these young mothers bear fruit one hundred-fold because it is prepared.
The kindergarten mother clubs have also borne fruit in the homes where even the youngest child has gone beyond the kindergarten's age. These mothers learn for the first time the need of sympathy; of living with the children through every period of growth; of sharing and of making together a home. The result is, the homes gain in moral fiber and moral purpose. The schools and the homes are brought into close relation through these beginnings, and the child finds its interests a unit, and home the place where its whole good is of vital importance. The mother establishes the home often on the basis of contrast. "It shall not be what mine was; their lives shall not be what mine was when I was a child."
The churches, many of them, provide for the social life of their people; these social activities must be of a character that wins those who have the least to contend with in themselves, who find a pleasure and inspiration in religious life, which often is far more a matter of temperament than of spiritual development.
One sees the highest expression of spiritual development in lives apart from the Church as well as in the Church. This it is that develops a feeling of reverence for any movement having for its object the bettering of the social life of the people. One learns that every vulgarity that becomes obnoxious; every freedom that is brought within the bounds of restraint by new standards of education and refinement; every influence set in motion because of the spiritual perception of the answer to the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" means spiritual life growing toward that of the Master of time, whose laws are but two for the guiding of men, "Love the Lord thy God," "Thy neighbor as thyself;" and these make neither cross nor steeple necessary, for they may be obeyed in the heart and guide the life wherever it is lived.
LIBRARY DAY AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.