hitch on here and help pull the load that may get mired
else? They need men and women in that work. Mere paid teaching will
never do it. If they can only get them, I think we may be standing upon
the threshold of something which shall bring us nearer to a universal
brotherhood than all the consecration and all the badges yet devised. I
am thinking of the children and of the chance to take them at once out
of the slum and into our hearts, while making of the public school the
door to a house of citizenship in which we shall all dwell together in
full understanding. Without that door the house will never be what we
planned. And there is the key, all ready-made, in the children.

[Illustration: The New Idea: a Stairway of Public School No. 170.]

The mere contact with nature, even out of a barrel, brought something to
those starved child lives that struck a new note. Sometimes it rang with
a sharp and jarring sound. The boys in the Hester Street school could
not be made to take an interest in the lesson on wheat until the teacher
came to the effect of drought and a bad year on the farmer's pocket.
Then they understood. They knew the process. Strikes cut into the
earnings of Hester Street, small enough at the best of times, at
frequent intervals, and the boys need not be told what a bad year means.
No other kind ever occurs there. They learned the lesson on wheat in no
time, after that. Oftener it was a gentler note that piped timidly in
the strange place. A barrel of wild roses came one day, instead of the
expected "specimens," and these were given to the children. They took
them greedily. "I wondered," said the teacher, "if it was more love of
the flower, or of getting something for nothing, no matter what." But
even if it were largely the latter, there was still the rose. Nothing
like it had come that way before, and without a doubt it taught its own
lesson. The Italian child might have jumped for it more eagerly, but its
beauty was not wasted in Jew-town, either. The baby kissed it, and it
lay upon more than one wan cheek, and whispered, who knows what thought
of hope and courage that were nearly gone. Even in Hester Street the
wild rose from the hedge was not wasted.

The result of it all was wholesome and good, because it was common
sense. The way to fight the slum in the children's lives is with
sunlight and flowers and play, which their child hearts crave, if their
eyes have never seen them. The teachers reported