rew round and big at the sight of the
golden glory from the fields, the like of which had never come their
way. The smaller the baby, and the poorer, the more wistful its look,
and so my flowers went. Who could have said them no?

"I learned then what I had but vaguely understood before, that there is
a hunger that is worse than that which starves the body and gets into
the newspapers. All children love beauty and beautiful things. It is
the spark of the divine nature that is in them and justifies itself!
To that ideal their souls grow. When they cry out for it they are
trying to tell us in the only way they can that if we let the slum
starve the ideal, with its dirt and its ugliness and its hard-trodden
mud where flowers were meant to grow, we are starving that which we
little know. A man, a human, may grow a big body without a soul; but
as a citizen, as a mother, he or she is worth nothing to the
commonwealth. The mark they are going to leave upon it is the black
smudge of the slum.

"So when in these latter days we invade that slum to make homes there
and teach the mothers to make them beautiful; when we gather the
children into kindergartens, hang pictures in the schools; when we
build beautiful new schools and public buildings and let in the light,
with grass and flower and bird, where darkness and foulness were
before; when we teach the children to dance and play and enjoy
themselves--alas! that it should ever be needed--we are trying to wipe
off the smudge, and to lift the heavy mortgage which it put on the
morrow, a much heavier one in the loss of citizenship than any
community, even the republic, can long endure. We are paying arrears
of debt which we incurred by our sad neglect, and we could be about no
better business."

There are many poor children in the slums of New York, Mr. Millionaire,
who could go into your drawing-room and carry away from its rich
canvases, its costly furnishings, a vision of beauty which you never
perceived in them because your esthetic faculties, your finer
sensibilities, were early stifled by your selfish pursuit of the dollar.

The world is full of beautiful things, but the majority have not been
trained to discern them. We can not see all the beauty that lies
around us, because our eyes have not been trained to see it; our
esthetic faculties have not been developed. We are like the lady who,
standing with the great artist, Turner, before one of his wonderful
landsc