What, then, of the barrack that destroys privacy, whose crowds make life loathsome, whose restricted and narrow quarters compel the use of the family room only for eating and sleeping; not the latter even when the summer heats come and the people, to live, must sleep on the roof or out on the fire-escape? What of those things which send the children to the street, there to grow such character as they can; that smother in them even the instinct for the open, for the fields and the woods that is like the last open window for the soul; rob them of those resources of mind and heart that make them respond quickly to the robin’s and the daisy’s appeal and make them at home in God’s nature; that give them the gutter for a playground, and the saloon, as they grow, for their natural meeting-place,—their only one, indeed; for it is only just beginning to dawn upon us that in neglecting that function of the public school, we have been guilty of a fearful and wicked waste. What of these; and what of the need—the need of making the rent—that sends the mother to the factory, leaving perhaps the little ones behind, locked in as the only alternative of the street? Locked in and left to the chance, the awful chance, of a fire in that tenement with the children helpless to get out and no one knowing of their plight. I say it with a shudder, for I have had to record as a reporter too many—oh! God! too many by far—of these things which wring the heart of a man. What of the grinding need that sends the mother to the shop and so knocks the big and the strong prop from under the home? Or, perhaps, the children go along. Then there is no home; for I do not call the cheerless room to which they return for their evening meal, tired and worn and spiritless, to sleep but not to play—I do not call that home. We know the curse of child labor. We know it to our sorrow and loss. Experience has taught us that it is loss, all loss, ever tending downward; that, however we figure it, the result is always the same: where men alone work, they earn the support of the family; where men and women work, they together earn the support, with nothing to spare; and where men, women and children work, they do that and no more; so that nothing is gained and everything is lost. Child-life and citizenship are lost; for the children of to-day are the men of to-morrow. We know it to our cost, and you have the lesson before you, though you do not seem to have learned it. When you do, you will find the cost appalling.