“‘It is good when it happens,’ say the children, ‘That we die before our time.’” —MRS. BROWNING. I In a New York kindergarten one winter’s morning a frail, dark-eyed girl stood by the radiator warming her tiny blue and benumbed hands. She was poorly and scantily clad, and her wan, pinched face was unutterably sad with the sadness that shadows the children of poverty and comes from cares which only maturer years should know. When she had warmed her little hands back to life again, the child looked wistfully up into the teacher’s face and asked:— “Teacher, do you love God?” “Why, yes, dearie, of course I love God,” answered the wondering teacher. “Well, I don’t—I hate Him!” was the fierce rejoinder. “He makes the wind blow, and I haven’t any warm clothes—He makes it snow, and my shoes have holes in them—He makes it cold, and we haven’t any fire at home—He makes us hungry, and mamma hadn’t any bread for our breakfast—Oh, I hate Him!”[41] This story, widely published in the newspapers two or three years ago and vouched for by the teacher, is remarkable no less for its graphic description of the thing called poverty than for the child’s passionate revolt against the supposed author of her misery. Poor, scanty clothing, cheerless homes, hunger day by day,—these are the main characteristics of that heritage of poverty to which so many thousands of children are born. Tens of thousands of baby lives are extinguished by its blasts every year as though they were so many candles swept by angry winds. But their fate is far more merciful and enviable than the fate of those who survive. For the children who survive the struggle with poverty in their infant years, and those who do not encounter that struggle until they have reached school age, not only feel the anguish and shame which comes with developed consciousness, but society imposes upon them the added burden of mental effort. Regarding education as the only safe anchorage for a Democracy, we make it compulsory and boast that it is one of the fundamental principles of our economy that every child shall be given a certain amount of elementary instruction. This is our safeguard against those evils which other generations regarded as being inherent in popular, representative government. The modern public school, with its splendid equipment devised to promote the mental and physical development of our future citizens, is based upon motives and instincts of self-preservation as distinct and clearly defined as those underlying our systems of naval and military defences against armed invasion, or the systems of public sanitation and hygiene through which we seek to protect ourselves from devastating plagues within.