| Saluting the Flag, | [Frontispiece] |
| | PAGE |
| The Mott Street Barracks, | [16] |
| An Italian Home under a Dump, | [25] |
| A Child of the Dump, | [28] |
| Pietro Learning to Make an Englis’ Letter, | [32] |
| “Slept in the Cellar Four Years,” | [41] |
| A Synagogue School in a Hester Street Tenement, | [46] |
| The Backstairs to Learning, | [48] |
| Class of Melammedim Learning English, | [50] |
| “I Scrubs.”—Katie who Keeps House in West Forty-ninth Street, | [61] |
| Present Tenants of John Ericsson’s Old House, now the Beach Street Industrial School, | [73] |
| Their Playground a Truck, | [86] |
| Shine, Sir? | [100] |
| Little Susie at her Work, | [110] |
| Minding the Baby, | [114] |
| “Shooting Craps” in the Hall of the Newsboys’ Lodging House, | [122] |
| Case No. 25,745 on the Society’s Blotter, Before and After, | [146] |
| Club Used for Beating a Child, | [152] |
| Summer Boarders from Mott Street, | [158] |
| Making for the “Big Water,” | [167] |
| Floating Hospital—St. John’s Guild, | [169] |
| Playing at Housekeeping, | [177] |
| Poverty Gappers Playing Coney Island, | [183] |
| Poverty Gap Transformed—the Spot where Young Healey was murdered is now a Playground, | [185] |
| The Late Charles Loring Brace, Founder of the Children’s Aid Society, | [188] |
| The First Patriotic Election in the Beach Street Industrial School—Parlor in John Ericsson’s Old House, | [201] |
| The Board of Election Inspectors in the Beach Street School, | [207] |
| The Plumbing Shop in the New York Trade Schools, | [212] |
| A Boys’ Club Reading room, | [222] |
| The Carpenter Shop in the Avenue C Working Boys’ Club, | [226] |
| Type-setting at the Avenue C Working Boys’ Club, | [231] |
| A Bout with the Gloves in the Boys’ Club of Calvary Parish, | [235] |
| Lining up for the Gymnasium, | [240] |
| A Snug Corner on a Cold Night, | [246] |
| 2 A.M. in the Delivery-room in the “Sun” Office, | [261] |
| Buffalo, | [264] |
| Night School in the West Side Lodging-house.—Edward, the Little Pedlar, Caught Napping, | [265] |
| The “Soup-House Gang,” Class in History in the Duane Street Newsboy’s Lodging-house, | [269] |
The problem of the children is the problem of the State. As we mould the children of the toiling masses in our cities, so we shape the destiny of the State which they will rule in their turn, taking the reins from our hands. In proportion as we neglect or pass them by, the blame for bad government to come rests upon us. The cities long since held the balance of power; their dominion will be absolute soon unless the near future finds some way of scattering the population which the era of steam-power and industrial development has crowded together in the great centres of that energy. At the beginning of the century the urban population of the United States was 3.97 per cent. of the whole, or not quite one in twenty-five. To-day it is 29.12 per cent., or nearly one in three. In the lifetime of those who were babies in arms when the first gun was fired upon Fort Sumter it has all but doubled. A million and a quarter live to-day in the tenements of the American metropolis. Clearly, there is reason for the sharp attention given at last to the life and the doings of the other half, too long unconsidered. Philanthropy we call it sometimes with patronizing airs. Better call it self-defence.