ame to the Board of Health
recently from one of the refugee tenements. The tenant was a man with a
houseful of children, too full for the official scale as applied to the
flat, and his plea was backed by the influence of his only friend in
need--the family undertaker. There was something so cruelly suggestive in
the idea that the laugh it raised died without an echo.

The census of the sweaters' district gave a total of 23,405 children under
six years, and 21,285 between six and fourteen, in a population of
something over a hundred and eleven thousand Russian, Polish, and
Roumanian Jews in the three wards mentioned; 15,567 are set down as
"children over fourteen." According to the record, scarce one-third of the
heads of families had become naturalized citizens, though the average of
their stay in the United States was between nine and ten years. The very
language of our country was to them a strange tongue, understood and
spoken by only 15,837 of the fifty thousand and odd adults enumerated.
Seven thousand of the rest spoke only German, five thousand Russian, and
over twenty-one thousand, could only make themselves understood to each
other, never to the world around them, in the strange jargon that passes
for Hebrew on the East Side, but is really a mixture of a dozen known
dialects and tongues and of some that were never known or heard anywhere
else. In the census it is down as just what it is--jargon, and nothing
else.

Here, then, are conditions as unfavorable to the satisfactory, even safe,
development of child life in the chief American city as could well be
imagined; more unfavorable even than with the Bohemians, who have at least
their faith in common with us, if safety lies in the merging through the
rising generation of the discordant elements into a common harmony. A
community set apart, set sharply against the rest in every clashing
interest, social and industrial; foreign in language, in faith, and in
tradition; repaying dislike with distrust; expanding under the new relief
from oppression in the unpopular qualities of greed and contentiousness
fostered by ages of tyranny unresistingly borne. Clearly, if ever there
was need of moulding any material for the citizenship that awaits it, it
is with this; and if ever trouble might be expected to beset the effort,
it might be looked for here. But it is not so. The record shows that of
the sixty thousand children, including the fifteen thousand young men and
wome