ing to
our own children a fair chance to learn honest trades, while letting
foreign workmen in in shoals to crowd our market under the plea of the
"solidarity of labor"--a policy that is in a fair way of losing to labor
all the respect due it from our growing youth, I shall not here discuss.
The general result was well put by a tireless worker in the cause of
improving the condition of the poor, who said to me, "They are down on the
scrub level; there you find them and have to put them to such use as you
can. They don't know anything else, and that is what makes it so hard to
find work for them. Even when they go into a shop to sew, they come out
mere machines, able to do only one thing, which is a small part of the
whole they do not grasp. And thus, without the slightest training for the
responsibilities of life, they marry and transmit their incapacity to
another generation that is so much worse to start off with." She spoke of
the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity
of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the mass
of such unions. Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the
children.

I have in mind a typical family of that sort which our relief committee
wrestled with a whole summer, in Poverty Gap. Suggestive location! The man
found his natural level on the island, where we sent him first thing. The
woman was decent and willing to work, and the girls young enough to train.
But Mrs. Murphy did not get on. "She can't even hold a flat-iron in her
hand," reported her first employer, indignantly. The children were sent to
good places in the country, and repaid the kindness shown them by stealing
and lying to cover up their thefts. They were not depraved; they were
simply exhibiting the fruit of the only training they had ever
received--that of the street. It was like undertaking a job of original
creation to try to make anything decent or useful out of them.

I confess I had always laid the blame for this discouraging feature of the
problem upon our general industrial development in a more or less vague
way--steam, machinery, and all that sort of thing--until the other day I
met a man who gave me another view of it altogether. He was a manufacturer
of cheap clothing, a very intelligent and successful one at that; a large
employer of cheap Hebrew labor and, heaven save the mark!--a Christian.
His sincerity was unquestionable. He had no secrets to keep fro