self-defence, when he
was seized and dragged away a prisoner. He was so dirty--school had only
just begun and there had been no time for the regular inspection--that he
was sentenced on the spot to be taken down and washed, while the other two
were led away to the principal's desk. All three went out howling.

I said that the Italians do not often abuse their children downright. The
padrone has had his day; the last was convicted seven years ago, and an
end has been put to the business of selling children into a slavery that
meant outrage, starvation, and death; but poverty and ignorance are
fearful allies in the homes of the poor against defenceless childhood,
even without the child-beating fiend. Two cases which I encountered in the
East Side tenements, in the summer of 1891, show how the combination works
at its worst. Without a doubt they are typical of very many, though I hope
that few come quite up to their standard. The one was the case of little
Carmen, who last March died in the New York Hospital, where she had lain
five long months, the special care of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children. One of the summer corps doctors found her in a Mott
Street tenement, within stone-throw of the Health Department office,
suffering from a wasting disease that could only be combated by the most
careful nursing. He put her case into the hands of the King's Daughters'
Committee that followed in the steps of the doctor, and it was then that I
saw her. She lay in a little back room, up two flights and giving upon a
narrow yard where it was always twilight. The room was filthy and close,
and entirely devoid of furniture, with the exception of a rickety stool, a
slop pail, and a rusty old stove, one end of which was propped up with
bricks. Carmen's bed was a board laid across the top of a barrel and a
trunk set on end. I could not describe, if I would, the condition of the
child when she was raised from the mess of straw and rags in which she
lay. The sight unnerved even the nurse, who had seen little else than such
scenes all summer. Loathsome bedsores had attacked the wasted little body,
and in truth Carmen was more dead than alive. But when, shocked and
disgusted, we made preparations for her removal with all speed to the
hospital, the parents objected and refused to let us take her away. They
had to be taken into court and forced to surrender the child under warrant
of law, though it was clearly the little suffe