Another peril of the city, and of the entire country as well, that comes through the foreigners is child neglect and labor; which means illiteracy, stunted body and mind, and often wreckage of life. Every foreign neighborhood is full of children, and sad enough is the average child of poverty. What makes the tenement district of the great city so terrible to you as you go into it is the sight of the throngs of children, who know little of home as you know it, have irregular and scanty meals, and surroundings of intemperance, dirt, foul atmosphere and speech, disease and vice. No wonder the police in these districts say that their worst trouble arises from the boys and the gangs of young "toughs." There is every reason for this unwholesome product. Mr. Hunter says there are not less than half a million children in Greater New York whose only playground is the street. Result, the street gang; and this gang is the really vital influence in the life of most boys in the large cities. It is this life, which develops, as Mr. Riis says, "dislike of regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, gambling propensities, absence of energy, and carelessness of the happiness of others." The great homeless, yardless tenement, where the children of the immigrants are condemned to live, is the nursery of sickness and crime. The child is left for good influence to the school, the settlement, or the mission. For the enormous amount of juvenile crime in the city, which it requires a special court to deal with, the conditions are more responsible than the children, or even than the parents, who are unable to maintain home life, and who, through the pinch of poverty or the impulse of avarice, give over the education of the children to school or street. Here is a picture of the life on its darker side: [Sidenote: Street Life of Children] "Crowded in the tenements where the bedrooms are small and often dark, where the living room is also a kitchen, a laundry, and often a garment-making shop, are the growing children whose bodies cry out for exercise and play. They are often an irritant to the busy mother, and likely as not the object of her carping and scolding. The teeming tenements open their doors, and out into the dark passageways and courts, through foul alleys and over broken sidewalks, flow ever renewed streams of playing children. Under the feet of passing horses, under the wheels of passing street-cars, jostled about by the pedestrian, driven on by the policeman, they annoy everyone. They crowd about the music or drunken brawls in the saloons, they play hide-and-seek about the garbage boxes, they shoot 'craps' in the alleys, they seek always and everywhere activity, movement, life."[77] [Sidenote: Imprisoned Childhood]