These two examples illustrate the kind of work that is going on all over the United States. Every religious body, Jewish or Christian, has some part in it. It touches many sides of life,--this effort to do for the common order what the State has never been able to accomplish fully,--to sweeten and humanize it. I wish that there were time to speak of some particularly interesting features, like the Children's Aid Society, the George Junior Republic, the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the Kindergarten Association. But now I must pass at once to the second kind of social effort, that in which the voluntary coöperation of the citizen enlightens and guides and supplements the action of the State. Here I might speak of the great question of the housing of the poor, and of the relation of private building and loan associations to governmental regulation of tenements and dwelling-houses. This is one of the points on which America has lagged behind the rest of the civilized world. Our excessive spirit of _laissez-faire_, and our cheerful optimism,--which in this case justifies the cynical definition of optimism as "an indifference to the sufferings of others,"--permitted the development in New York of the most congested and rottenly overcrowded ten acres on the face of the habitable globe. But the Tenement House Commission of 1894, and the other commissions which followed it, did much to improve conditions. A fairly good Tenement House Act was passed. A special Department of the municipality was created to enforce it. The dark interior rooms, the vile and unsanitary holes, the lodgings without water or air or fire-escapes, are being slowly but surely broken up and extirpated, and a half-dozen private societies, combining philanthropy with business, are building decent houses for working people, which return from 3 per cent to 5 per cent on the capital invested. For our present purpose, however, it will be better to take an example which is less complicated, and in which the coöperation of the State and the good-will of the private citizen can be more closely and simply traced. I mean the restriction and the regulation of child labour. Every intelligent nation sees in its children its most valuable asset. That their physical and moral development should be dwarfed or paralyzed by bondage to exhausting and unwholesome labour, or by a premature absorption in toil of any kind, would be at once a national disgrace and a national calamity. Three kinds of societies have been and still are at work in America to prevent this shame and disaster. First, there are the societies which are devoted to the general protection of all the interests of the young, like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.