street, and left
nothing to be explained in the verdict of the reformatory, "No moral
sense." There was no moral sense to be got out of the thing, for there
was little sense of any kind in it. The boy was not given a chance to be
honest with himself by thinking a thing through; he came naturally to
accept as his mental horizon the headlines in his penny paper and the
literature of the Dare-Devil-Dan-the-Death-Dealing-Monster-of-Dakota
order, which comprise the ordinary aesthetic equipment of the slum. The
mystery of his further development into the tough need not perplex
anybody.

But Jacob Beresheim had not even the benefit of such schooling as there
was to be had. He did not go to school, and nobody cared. There was
indeed a law directing that every child should go, and a corps of truant
officers to catch him if he did not; but the law had been a dead letter
for a quarter of a century. There was no census to tell which children
ought to be in school, and no place but a jail to put those in who
shirked. Jacob was allowed to drift. From the time he was twelve till he
was fifteen, he told me, he might have gone to school three weeks,--no
more.

Church and Sunday-school missed him. I was going to say that they passed
by on the other side, remembering the migration of the churches up-town
as the wealthy moved out of and the poor into the region south of
Fourteenth Street. But that would hardly be fair. They moved after their
congregations; but they left nothing behind. In the twenty years that
followed the war, while enough to people a large city moved in
down-town, the number of churches there was reduced from 141 to 127.
Fourteen Protestant churches moved out. Only two Roman Catholic churches
and a synagogue moved in. I am not aware that there has been any large
increase of churches in the district since, but we have seen that the
crowding has not slackened pace. Jacob had no trouble in escaping the
Sunday-school, as he had escaped the public school. His tribe will have
none until the responsibility incurred in the severance of Church and
State sits less lightly on a Christian community, and the Church, from a
mob, shall have become an army, with von Moltke's plan of campaign,
"March apart, fight together." The Christian Church is not alone in its
failure. The Jew's boy is breaking away from safe moorings rather faster
than his brother of the new dispensation. The Church looks on, but it
has no cause for congratulatio