What else was the meaning of the testimony given before the Coal Strike Commission, that moved its members to tears and anger by turns? And why in the twelfth census has Pennsylvania fallen from the sixteenth to the twentieth place on the list of states that send their children to school? It is true that there has been no absolute retrogression, for while in 1890 there were over two per cent. of your children between the ages of ten and fourteen years who could neither read nor write, in 1900 the illiterates numbered barely over one in a hundred. But that one is one too many, and why is he there? Because, according to the showing of the factory inspectors—and the factory inspectors are always optimists—there were thirty-five thousand of your children at work, who should have been in school, not counting the breaker-boys in your mines. As to them, the coal operators owned up to thirty thousand being in the mines who never should have been there. So we are not alone in our sins against childhood. New York is first among the great industrial states, Pennsylvania is second, and this is the showing we make as toward the citizenship of to-morrow: New York fourteenth, Pennsylvania twentieth. Even South Dakota and Wyoming are ahead of Pennsylvania, and Utah a long way ahead of New York. Industrial States! The industrial supremacy that is bought at the expense of childhood’s rights tends directly to man’s enslavement. It is too dearly bought. Sins against childhood are sins against the home, are cheating the world of its to-morrow. And you salve your consciences in vain with the thought that those illiterate ones are the children of foreigners. _You_ let them in, to be your Americans of the day that is coming;—you sent for them, your critics say, to underbid the labor that sought a higher wage because they wanted American homes,—and it is your business to see to it that they, or their children, at all events, fit into the state of which you have made them part. Or woe to that state! You need not marvel that in the commonwealth that forgets its duty to the home even to that extent, you have a heavy contract on your hands to redeem its greatest city. It is the same conscience that is asleep there. It is all of a piece. Every once in awhile I hear some one growl against foreign missions because the money and the strength put into them are needed at home. I did it myself when I did not know better, God forgive me. I know better now; and I will tell you how I found out. I became interested in a strong religious awakening in my own old city of Copenhagen, and I set about investigating it. It was then that I learned what others have learned before me, and what was the fact there, that for every dollar you give away to convert the heathen abroad, God gives you ten dollars’ worth of purpose to deal with your heathen at home. So, as you set about crushing out selfishness, greed and evil in the state, you step on the snake’s head at home,—in your own city.