"There is no waste! But can we say the same about the far more important business of producing citizens? Look at the men in our prisons. Wasted material. Had they been treated, when they were the raw material of childhood, with even a part of the intelligence and care that is devoted to turning the pig into use, into profit, they would have been manufactured into good citizens. And these men in prisons are but a fraction of the great human waste. Think of the uncaught criminals, of the stunted children, of the human wreckage floating about the city, of the women who live by their shame!--all wasted human material. And all the time more children are growing up to take the places of these when they are gone. Why, if any business man should run his factory as we conduct our business of producing citizens, he'd be bankrupt in a year! "This waste _can_ be saved. I do not mean the men now in prison, nor the women in the street, nor those on whom ill conditions have fastened disease--though even they need not be wholly lost. I mean their successors, the growing children. If the production of citizens were a business run for profit--which in a sense it is, for each good citizen is worth thousands of dollars to the country--and were placed in the hands of a modern business man, then you would see! Had he been packer, steel manufacturer, goldsmith, not a bristle, not an ounce of steel, not the infinitesimal filings of gold, escaped him. Do you think that he would let millions of human beings, worth, to put a sordid money value upon their heads, ten thousand dollars apiece, be wasted? Never! He would find the great business leak and stop it. He would save all. "And how save? I am a believer in heredity, yes; but I believe far more in the influence of surroundings. Let a child be cradled in the gutter and nursed by wickedness; let wickedness be its bedfellow, playfellow, workfellow, its teacher, its friend--and what do you get? The prisons tell you. Let the same child grow up surrounded by decency, and you have a decent child and later a decent man. Could the thousands and thousands of children who are developing towards criminality, towards profligacy, towards a stunted maturity, be set amid good conditions, the leak would be stopped, or almost--the great human waste would be brought to an end. They would be saved to themselves, and saved to their country. "Nothing of all this is new to you, Miss Chambers. I have said so much because I wanted to make clear what has become my great dream--the great dream of so many. I should like to do my little part towards rousing the negligent, indifferent world to the awfulness of this waste--towards making it as economical of its people as it is of its pigs and its pig-iron. That is my dream."