r opportunities for the development of personality.

243. =How the Children Live.=--The best way to understand how the
children live is to put oneself in their place. Imagine waking in the
morning in a stuffy, overcrowded room, eating a slice of bread or an
onion for breakfast and looking forward to a bite for lunch and an
ill-cooked evening meal, or in many cases starting out for the day
without any breakfast, glad to leave the tenement for the street, and
staying there throughout waking hours, when not in school, using it
for playground, lunch-room, and loafing-place, and regarding it as
pleasanter than home. Imagine going to school half fed and poorly
clothed, sometimes the butt of a playmate's gibes because of a drunken
father or a slatternly mother, required to study subjects that make no
appeal to the child and in a language that is not native, and then
back to the street, perhaps to sell papers until far into the night,
or to run at the beck and call of the public as a messenger boy. Many
a child, in spite of the public opposition to child labor, is put to
work to help support the family, and department store and bootblack
parlor are conspicuous among their places of occupation. Mills and
factories employ them for special kinds of labor, and States are lax
in the enforcement of child-labor laws after they are on the statute
books.

244. =The Street Trades.=--Employment in the street trades is very
common among the children of the tenements. There are numerous
opportunities to peddle fruit and small wares at a small wage;
messenger and news boys are always in demand, and the bootblacking
industry absorbs many of the immigrant class. By these means the
family income is pieced out, sometimes wholly provided, but the ill
effects of such child labor are disturbing to the peace of mind of the
well-wishers of children. Street labor works physical injury from
exposure to inclement weather and to accident, from too great fatigue,
and from irregular habits of eating and sleeping. It provokes resort
to stimulants and sows the seeds of disease, vice, and petty crime.
Moral deterioration follows from the bad habits formed, from the
encouragement to lawbreaking and independence of parental authority,
and from the evil environment of the people and places with which they
come into contact. Children are susceptible to the influence of their
elders, and easily form attachments for those who treat them well.
Saloons and disorder