from a rich man who lives
on the Avenue, offering to make another Poverty Park for the
tenement-house children of another street, if he had to buy the lots. I
told him the story of Poverty Gap and bade him go and see for himself if
he could spend his money to better purpose. There are no play-grounds yet
below Fourteenth Street and room and need for fifty. The Alley and the
Avenue could not meet on a plane that argues better for the understanding
between the two that has been too long and needlessly delayed.

CHAPTER XII.

THE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS

That "dirt is a disease," and their mission to cure it, was the new gospel
which the managers of the Children's Aid Society carried to the slums a
generation ago. In practice they have not departed from their profession.
Their pill is the Industrial School, their plaster a Western farm and a
living chance in exchange for the tenement and the city slum. The
wonder-cures they have wrought by such simple treatment have been many. In
the executive chair of a sovereign State sits to-day a young man who
remembers with gratitude and pride the day they took him in hand and, of
the material the street would have moulded into a tough, made an honorable
man and a governor. And from among the men whose careers of usefulness
began in the Society's schools, and who to-day, as teachers, ministers,
lawyers, and editors, are conspicuous ornaments of the communities, far
and near, in which they have made their homes, he would have no difficulty
in choosing a cabinet that would do credit and honor to his government.
Prouder monument could be erected to no man's memory than this record at
the grave of the late Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children's
Aid Society.

[Illustration: THE LATE CHARLES LORING BRACE, FOUNDER OF THE CHILDREN'S
AID SOCIETY.]

The Industrial School plants itself squarely in the gap between the
tenement and the public school. If it does not fill it, it at least
spreads itself over as much of it as it can, and in that position
demonstrates that this land of lost or missing opportunities is not the
barren ground once supposed, but of all soil the most fruitful, if
properly tilled. Wherever the greatest and the poorest crowds are, there
also is the Industrial School. The Children's Aid Society maintains
twenty-one in seventeen of the city's twenty-four wards, not counting
twelve evening schools, five of which are in the Society's
lodging-houses. It