l is our chief defence against the tenement and the
flood of ignorance with which it would swamp us. Prohibition of child
labor without compelling the attendance at school of the freed slaves is
a mockery. The children are better off working than idling, any day. The
physical objections to the one alternative are vastly outweighed by the
moral iniquities of the other.

I have tried to set forth the facts. They carry their own lesson. The then
State Superintendent of Education, Andrew Draper, read it aright when, in
his report for 1889, he said about the compulsory education law:

"It does not go far enough and is without an executor. It is barren of
results.... It may be safely said that no system will be effectual in
bringing the unfortunate children of the streets into the schools which at
least does not definitely fix the age within which children must attend
the schools, which does not determine the period of the year within which
all must be there, which does not determine the method for gathering all
needed information, which does not provide especial schools for
incorrigible cases, which does not punish people charged with the care of
children for neglecting their education, and which does not provide the
machinery and officials for executing the system."

CHAPTER VIII.

WHAT IT IS THAT MAKES BOYS BAD

I am reminded, in trying to show up the causes that go to make children
bad, of the experience of a certain sanitary inspector who was laboring
with the proprietor of a seven-cent lodging-house to make him whitewash
and clean up. The man had reluctantly given in to several of the
inspector's demands; but, as they kept piling up, his irritation grew,
until at the mention of clean sheets he lost all patience and said, with
bitter contempt, "Well! you needn't tink dem's angels!"

They were not--those lodgers of his--they were tramps. Neither are the
children of the street angels. If, once in a while, they act more like
little devils the opportunities we have afforded them, as I have tried to
show, hardly give us the right to reproach them. They are not the kind of
opportunities to make angels. And yet, looking the hundreds of boys in the
Juvenile Asylum over, all of whom were supposed to be there because they
were bad (though, as I had occasion to ascertain, that was a mistake--it
was the parents that were bad in some cases), I was struck by the fact
that they were anything but a depraved lot. Except as t