been brought up in factories, household restraint frets their soul. Of household economy, so necessary to the city toiler, they know nothing. If ends meet it is well. If not, there is trust and sorrow. The day of their marriage means a few stuffy rooms, badly ventilated, filled with the most bizarre and useless furniture put in by shylock, who will, in the coming years, exact ten times their value. Thus started, children are born, puny and sickly, prey of physician and druggist. If these children survive, at an early age they follow the father and mother by entering foundries and factories to toil life’s weary round away. When they die the family is pauperized for years. It is a common plaint of the tenements that “I would have been worth something if my boy had not died.” Every death is not only a drain on the immediate family, but on their friends, who are supposed to turn out and give “the corpse a decent burial.” The decent burial means coaches, flowers and whiskey. The most casual observer must notice the giant part liquor plays, in the lives of the poor. Liquor and its concomitant, tobacco, in the deadly form of cigarettes, are known to the boy. He has been brought up in that atmosphere. His father has his cheap, ill-smelling cigar and frothy pint for supper. His mother and a few gossiping friends have chased the heavy day with a few pints “because they were dry.” He delights in being the Mercury of the “growler.” Hanging by the balustrade he sips the beer, “just to taste it.” That taste, alas, lingers through life. As he grows older it becomes more refined. His teachers are the sumptuous, dazzling bar-rooms guarding each city corner, while betraying the nation. The owners of these vice palaces are wise in their generation. For his stuffy home, broken furniture and cheerless aspects, they show him wide, airy rooms, polished furniture, bevelled glass mirrors, dazzling light, music, gaiety, companionship, and the illusive charm of revelry. The reading matter in such places is on a par with the other attractions. It is sensational. Its authors are skilled in the base development of the passions. It smacks obscenity, and early dulls the intellect to finer things. To be enmeshed in its threads is the greatest sorrow of a young life. When the bar-room does not allure, there is another siren to be taken into account. It is the promiscuous gathering at the neighbor’s house who has been so unfortunate as to find a music dealer to trust him with a piano at three times its price. Here gather the Romeos and Juliets to “Sing and dance And parley vous France, Drink beer Alanna And play on the grand piano.”