out the best
that is in him. Most of them have libraries suited to the children. The
College Settlement has a very excellent one of more than a thousand
volumes, which is in constant use. The managers report that the boys
clamor for history and science, popularly presented, as boys do
everywhere, while the girls mainly read fiction. The success of different
plans demonstrates the futility of some pet theories on this phase of
social economics at least, in the present state of knowledge on the
subject. The Boys' Club in St. Mark's Place, for instance, is kept
entirely free from religious influence of any sort, and their experience
has led many of its friends to believe that success is possible only in
that way. Probably in that particular case it might not have been possible
on anything like such a scale in any other way. The mud of Tompkins Square
testified loudly enough to that. On the other hand, the managers of some
very successful and active boys' clubs that have sprouted under Church
influence and with a strong Sunday-school bias, maintain with conviction
that theirs is the true and only plan. One holds that only in leaving
religion out is there hope of success; the other, that there can be none
without letting it in and keeping it ever in the foreground. Each sees
only half the truth. It is not the profession, or lack of profession, of a
principle, but the principle itself that is the condition of success--the
real sympathy and interest in the children that bids them come and be
welcome, that seeks to understand their needs and help them for their own
sake, a religion that "beats preaching" among the poor any day. It is a
question of men and of hearts, not of faith. And the poorer the children,
the more friendless and forsaken, the more readily do they respond to
approaches in that spirit. The testimony of a teacher in the Poverty Gap
play-ground, who went up town to take charge of one where the children
were better dressed and correspondingly "stuck up," was that in all their
rags and dirt the little toughs of the Gap were much the more approachable
and more promising to work with.

[Illustration: THE CARPENTER SHOP IN THE AVENUE C WORKING BOYS' CLUB.]

Naturally the Church might be expected to have found this out and to be
turning the knowledge to use. And it is so. All sects are reaching now for
the children in a healthy rivalry, in which the old cry about empty pews
is being smothered and forgotten. Of the