to the people's life, because upon that does that very life
depend. Turn back to what I said about the slum tenant and see what it
means: in the slum only 4.97 per cent of native parentage. All but five
in a hundred had either come over the sea, or else their parents had.
Nearly half (46.65) were ignorant, illiterate; for the whole city the
percentage of illiteracy was only 7.69. Turn to the reformatory showing:
of ten thousand and odd prisoners 66.55 utterly illiterate, or able to
read and write only with difficulty. Do you see how the whole battle
with the slum is fought out in and around the public school? For in
ignorance selfishness finds its opportunity, and the two together make
the slum.

The mere teaching is only a part of it. The school itself is a
bigger--the meeting there of rich and poor. Out of the public school
comes, must come if we are to last, the real democracy that has our hope
in keeping. I wish it were in my power to compel every father to send
his boy to the public school; I would do it, and so perchance bring the
school up to the top notch where it was lacking. The President of the
United States to-day sets a splendid example to us all in letting his
boys mingle with those who are to be their fellow-citizens by and by. It
is precisely in the sundering of our society into classes that have
little in common, _that are no longer neighbors_, that our peril lives.
A people cannot work together for the good of the state if they are not
on speaking terms. In the gap the slum grows up. That was one reason why
I hailed with a shout the proposition of Mr. Schwab, the steel trust
millionnaire, to take a regiment of boys down to Staten Island on an
excursion every day in summer. Let me see, I haven't told about that, I
think. He had bought a large property down there, all beach and lake and
field and woodland, and proposed to build a steamer with room for a
thousand or two, and then take them down with a band of music on board,
and give them a swim, a romp, and a jolly good time. As soon as he
spoke to me about it, I said: Yes! and hitch it to the public school
somehow; make it part of the curriculum. No more nature study out of a
barrel! Take the whole school, teachers and all, and let them do their
own gathering of specimens. So the children shall be under efficient
control, and so the tired teacher shall get a chance too. But more than
all, so it may befall that the boys themselves shall come to know one