er ways of
putting the machinery to use. The city will foot the bill, if we will
show them how. And we will show them how.

[Illustration: Truck Farming on the Site of Stryker's Lane.]

The last four years have set us fifty years ahead, and there is no
doubling on that track now. Where we had one kindergarten when I was put
out of the Fourth Ward school by a trustee for daring to intrude there
to find out what they were teaching, we have a hundred and fifteen at
this writing in Manhattan alone, and soon we shall have as many as five
hundred that are part of the public school in the greater city. "The
greatest blessing which the nineteenth century bequeathed to little
children," Superintendent Maxwell calls the kindergarten, and since the
children are our own to-morrow, he might have said to all of us, to the
state. The kindergarten touch is upon the whole system of teaching.
Cooking, the only kind of temperance preaching that counts for anything
in a school course, is taught in the girls' classes. A minister of
justice declared in the Belgian Chamber that the nation was reverting
to a new form of barbarism, which he described by the term "alcoholic
barbarism," and pointed out as its first cause the "insufficiency of the
food procurable by the working classes." He referred to the quality, not
the quantity. The United States experts, who lately made a study of the
living habits of the poor in New York, spoke of it as a common
observation that "a not inconsiderable amount of the prevalent
intemperance can be traced to poor food and unattractive home tables."
The toasting-fork in Jacob's sister's hand beats preaching in the
campaign against the saloon, just as the boys' club beats the police
club in fighting the gang.

The cram and the jam are being crowded out as common-sense teaching
steps in and takes their place, and the "three H's," the head, the
heart, and the hand,--a whole boy,--are taking the place too long
monopolized by the "three R's." There was need of it. It had seemed
sometimes as if, in our anxiety lest he should not get enough, we were
in danger of stuffing the boy to the point of making a hopeless dunce of
him. It is a higher function of the school to teach principles than to
impart facts merely. Teaching the boy municipal politics and a thousand
other things to make a good citizen of him, instead of so filling him
with love of his country and pride in its traditions that he is bound to
take the right s