an uncomprehending stare for reply.

[Illustration: Superintendent C. B. J. Snyder, who builds our Beautiful
Schools.]

But in spite of the dullards, the new life I spoke of, the new sense of
responsibility of our citizenship, is stirring. The People's Institute
draws nightly audiences to the great hall of the Cooper Institute for
the discussion of present problems and social topics--audiences largely
made up of workingmen more or less connected with the labor movement.
The "People's Club," an outgrowth of the Institute, offers a home for
the lonely wage-earner, man or woman, and more accept its offer every
year. It has now nearly four hundred members, one fourth of them women.
Every night its rooms at 241 East Fourteenth Street are filled. Classes
for study and recreation are organized right along. The People's
University Extension Society invades the home, the nursery, the
kindergarten, the club, wherever it can, with help and counsel to
mothers with little children, to young men and to old. In a hundred
ways those who but yesterday neither knew nor cared how the other half
lived are reaching out and touching the people's life. The social
settlements labor unceasingly, and where there was one a dozen years ago
there are forty. Down on the lower East Side, the Educational Alliance
conducts from the Hebrew Institute an energetic campaign among the
Jewish immigrants that reaches many thousands of souls, two-thirds of
them children, every day in the week. More than threescore clubs hold
meetings in the building on Saturday and Sunday. Under the same roof the
Baron Hirsch Fund teaches the children of refugee Jews the first
elements of American citizenship, love for our language and our flag,
and passes them on to the public schools within six months of their
landing, the best material they receive from anywhere.

So the boy is being got ready for dealing, in the years that are to
come, with the other but not more difficult problems of setting his
house to rights, and ridding it of the political gang which now
misrepresents him and us. And justice to Jacob is being evolved. Not yet
without obstruction and dragging of feet. The excellent home library
plan that proved so wholesome in the poor quarters of Boston has only
lately caught on in New York, because of difficulty in securing the
visitors upon whom the plan depends for its success.[40] The same want
has kept the boys' club from reaching the development that would a