And now this to-morrow! Let me bring you face to face with it as it confronted me one day, years ago, in East 16th Street directly opposite St. George’s Church. It stood there in the person of a ragamuffin, typical, in his rags and dirt, of his kind and quite in the character; for he was engaged in slinging mud. He dug it out of the gutter by the fistful and distributed it impartially all over the church across the way. Why the church, I wondered as I watched him. He, the boy, had no stouter friend than its stalwart rector. Why then throw mud at his church? I went up to ask and for once he was taken unawares. I was upon him before he saw me and put my hand upon his shoulder! and that moment I knew what I wanted to know, what ailed the lad. The years that have passed have added many details to the record of his case, but nothing of the first importance. It was all clear to me that instant; for he turned like a hunted wild beast, his fistful of mud gripped tight, to confront the enemy—it could be nothing else. In all his dreary little life no hand had ever been laid upon his shoulder in kindness. That was the story. That _is_ the story too often yet. Every man’s hand raised against him, his was raised against the world that would have none of him. It was self-defense. I saw it and was dumb. Presently I remembered that I had started to interview him, and asked questions. He did not answer them, but his looks were more eloquent than words; and, at the hard places, another street Arab, a degree less dirty and less spiteful than he, ventured responses that let in the light. Read and write he could not, never went to school. I stared at that; visions of truant officers, of compulsory education laws, rose up before me. I little knew then the true condition of things—it was years after that that our first school census showed us fifty thousand children in the street who should have been on the school-benches, but were shut out for lack of room. What did he know? Nothing. But, said I impatiently, what can he do, what does he do? “He?” said the other boy with a contempt for my lack of understanding, which he made no effort to conceal, “He throws stones!” And mud. That was all, all we had taught him in his apprenticeship of the street, his preparation for the citizenship that was to come. That was _our_ end of the story.