d the sandwich to the bartender
and made no arrests.]

We shall see how it affects him. He is the one for whom we are waging
the battle with the slum. He is the to-morrow that sits to-day drinking
in the lesson of the prosperity of the big boss who declared with pride
upon the witness stand that he rules New York, that judges pay him
tribute, and that only when _he_ says so a thing "goes"; and that he is
"working for his own pocket all the time just the same as everybody
else." He sees corporations pay blackmail and rob the people in return,
quite according to the schedule of Hester Street. Only there it is the
police who charge the pedler twenty cents, while here it is the
politicians taking toll of the franchises, twenty per cent. Wall Street
is not ordinarily reckoned in the slum, because of certain physical
advantages; but, upon the evidence of the day, I think we shall have to
conclude that the advantage ends there. The boy who is learning such
lessons,--how is it with him?

The president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
says that children's crime is increasing, and he ought to know. The
managers of the Children's Aid Society, after nearly fifty years of
wrestling with the slum for the boy, in which they have lately seemed to
get the upper hand, said recently, that on the East Side children are
growing up in certain districts "entirely neglected," and that the
number of such children "increases beyond the power of philanthropic and
religious bodies to cope properly with their needs." In the Tompkins
Square Lodging House the evening classes were thinning out, and the
keeper wailed, "Those with whom we have dealt of late have not been
inclined to accept this privilege; how to make night school attractive
to shiftless, indifferent street boys is a difficult problem to solve."

Perhaps it was only that he had lost the key. Across the square, the
Boys' Club of St. Mark's Place, that began with a handful, counts seven
thousand members to-day, and is building a house of its own. The school
census man announces that no boy in that old stronghold of the "bread or
blood" brigade need henceforth loiter in the street because of there not
being room in the public school, and the brigade has disbanded for want
of recruits. The factory is being more and more firmly shut against the
boy, and the bars let down at the playground. From Tompkins Square,
nevertheless, came Jacob Beresheim, whose story let