At this time there was a great deal of activity among many leading women in the State to have a bill passed by the Legislature that would compel the Mayor of cities of the first class to appoint women in the proportion of one-third of the whole number appointed to the Boards of Education of those cities. The greatest activity for this measure was exercised in Brooklyn. One of the leaders, when asked a question about one of the schools in her own district, did not know where the school was. She had been a tax-payer in the district twenty-two years, and was considered a progressive woman. Her chief reason for working for this bill, for spending money freely in the interest of its success, was man's indifference to school matters. Perhaps if the command, "Feed my lambs" had been given to Dorcas instead of Peter, she might have developed enough sense of responsibility about the mental food given to know where the school buildings of her own school district were located. In this school district, October, 1901, there were 574 children on half-day classes. There was no manual training, though the pupils in the schools were, for the most part, the children of day laborers, mechanics, and clerks on small salaries. There was no free library, nor prospect of any, because public sentiment did not demand it. There was one small park, difficult of access. To reach it from the outer sections of the district, the tracks used by nine lines of trolley cars must be crossed. There were no public baths, except one in summer, near the mouth of a large sewer. One of the schools had no out-door playground; two had the closets in the in-door playgrounds. There was no room where the teachers could retire if ill, or where they could take their luncheons; no rooms where pupils could be privately interviewed or taken if ill. Yet it is in this very district, where the oldest and wealthiest families of the city live; where nine-tenths of the philanthropic enterprises of the city have been born, and where the moral upheavals for the regeneration of the city will always find their quota of leaders, that there is developing some of the worst evils of a cosmopolitan city. Within its borders is a fair-sized Italian city, with scores of sweat-shops. Across the thoroughfare is a large Irish village lying at the foot of the hill, the streets dirty, unpaved, the houses in an unsanitary condition. Some of them are overrun with rats of enormous size. The streets at the top of the hill are beginning to yield to the pressure of the crowds at the foot. Specific houses seem to have in them the very germs of immorality and degeneracy. Women who have made a struggle when, by misfortune, forced to move into these houses cease to struggle, and yield to the influences about them. The tenement-house laws are violated openly.