We have been busy since making inquiries concerning this lad who is our to-morrow. We have been at work among the underpinnings to see how fared the props upon which we build character, citizenship—the same thing in the end. When the test comes, they are convertible terms. And the props were not there—they were gone! What had become of them? I have shown you how beset is the home whence came the boy who throws the mud. There is no stronger prop under the character that forms in the growing boy than his home. The tenement is a destroyer of home and of character, of the individuality that makes character tell. A homeless city—a city without civic pride, without citizen virtue, a despoiler of children, a destroyer of the to-morrow. Did I tell you of my friend whose house stands in a garden with a sand-heap in which the children dig and romp with their cat and the kittens and the terrier dog? Of how the dog _will_ try to smother a kitten now and then in an opportune sand-hole, with the children ever on the watch to avert the threatened catastrophe? And of how they did avert it, until one unlucky day they found a dead kitten in the sand-heap. Whereupon the little girl rushed into her mother’s presence with it in her apron and cried out indignantly: “There, mamma, a perfectly good cat spoiled!” Just so with these children of the tenement. Perfectly good, as good as any on the avenue with the brown stone mansions, they are spoiled in the tenement house slum, and the loss is ours, an irreparable loss. The chief prop under the character of the growing boy is gone. Nothing can replace it; nothing ever does. The school is another. How about the lad’s school? The census of which I spoke told us that story seven years ago; and we were surprised. It would have been more to the point had there been no cause for surprise. Two chief props of the to-morrow, of the state—the home and the school—and both neglected! Fifty thousand children in the street who should have been in school! Where the prop had not been knocked out, what had our neglect made of it? I remember my efforts to catechize a sewing class of girls, all out of the public school, on the subject of Napoleon, of whom there was a big picture on a poster just across the street. Not one of them knew who he was. They thought the picture was of some wild west show character, Buffalo Bill perhaps. Yes, there was one who “believed she had heard of the gentleman before.” She said it timidly and was evidently not sure that she might not be doing an injury to some innocent citizen who might rise and object. This was what she had heard “that he had two wives.” Not that he was a great general, not that he was a soldier, a lawgiver, a ruler, a leader of men; but that he had two wives. It was Napoleon scaled down to the level of the slum.