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I have in mind a typical family of that sort which our committee wrestled with a whole summer in Poverty Gap. Suggestive location! The man found his natural level on the Island, where we sent him first thing. The woman was decent and willing to work, and the girls young enough to train. But Mrs. Murphy did not get on. "She can't even hold a flat-iron in her hand," reported her first employer indignantly. The children were sent to good places in the country, and repaid the kindness shown them by stealing, and lying to cover up their thefts. They were not depraved, they were simply exhibiting the fruit of the only training they had ever received -- that of the street. It was like undertaking a job of original creation to try to make anything decent or useful out of them.

Another case that exhibits the shoal that lies always close to the track of ignorant poverty, is even now running in my mind, vainly demanding a practical solution. I may say that I inherited it from professional philanthropists, who had struggled with it for more than half a dozen years without finding the away out they sought. There were five children when they began, depending on a mother who had about given up the struggle as useless. The father was a loafer. When we took them the children numbered ten, and the struggle was long since over. The family bore the pauper stamp, and the mother's tears, by a transition imperceptible probably to herself, had become its stock in trade. Two of the children were working, earning all the money that came in; those that were not lay about in the room, watching the charity visitor in a way and with an intentness that betrayed their interest in the mother's appeal. It required very little experience to make the prediction that shortly ten pauper families would carry on the campaign of the one against society, if those children lived to grow up. And they were not to blame, of course. I scarcely know which was most to be condemned -- when we tried to break the family up by throwing it on the street as a necessary step to getting possession of the children -- the politician who tripped us up with his influence in the court, or the landlord who had all those years made the poverty on the second floor pan out a golden interest. It was the outrageous rent for the filthy den that had been the most effective argument with sympathizing visitors. Their pity had represented to the owner, as nearly as I could make out, for eight long years, a capital of $2,600 invested at six per cent., payable monthly. The idea of moving was preposterous; for what other landlord would take in a homeless family with ten children and no income?

Naturally the teaching of these children must begin by going backward. The process may be observed in the industrial schools, of which there are twenty-one scattered through the poor tenement districts, with a total enrolment of something over five thousand pupils. (2) A count made last October showed that considerably more than one-third were born in twelve foreign countries where English was not spoken, and that over ten per cent, knew no word of our language. The vast majority of the rest were children of foreign parents, mostly German and Irish, born here. According to the location of the school it is distinctively Italian, Bohemian, Hebrew, or mixed, the German, Irish, and colored children coming in under this head and mingling without the least friction. Whatever its stamp of nationality, the curriculum is much the same. The start, as often as is necessary, is made with an object-lesson -- soap and water being the elements and the child the object. The alphabet comes second on the list. Later on follow lessons in sewing, cooking, carpentry for the boys, and like practical "branches," of which the home affords the child no demonstration. The prizes for good behavior are shoes and clothing, the special inducement a free lunch in the dinner hour. Very lately a unique exercise has been added to the course in the schools, that lays hold of the very marrow of the problem with which they deal. It is called "saluting the flag," and originated with Colonel George T. Balch, of the Board of Education, who conceived the idea of instilling patriotism into the little future citizens of the Republic in doses to suit their childish minds. To talk about the Union, of which most of them had but the vaguest notion, or of the duty of the citizen, of which they had no notion at all, was nonsense. In the flag it was all found embodied in a central idea which they could grasp. In the morning the star-spangled banner was brought into the school, and the children were taught to salute it with patriotic words. Then the best scholar of the day before was called out of the ranks, and it was given to him or her to keep for the day. The thing took at once and was a tremendous success.

Then was evolved the plan of letting the children decide for themselves whether or not they would so salute the flag as a voluntary offering, while incidentally instructing them in the duties of the voter at a time when voting was the one topic of general interest. Ballot-boxes were set up in the schools on the day before the last general election. The children had been furnished with ballots for and against the flag the week before, and told to take them home to their parents and talk it over with them. On Monday they cast their votes with all the solemnity of a regular election, and with as much of its simple machinery as was practicable. As was expected, only very few votes against the flag were recorded. One little Irishman in the Mott Street school came without his ballot. "The old man tore it up," he reported. In the East Seventy-third Street school five Bohemians of tender years set themselves down as opposed to the scheme of making Americans of them. Only one, a little girl, gave her reason. She brought her own flag to school: "I vote for that," she said, sturdily, and the teacher wisely recorded her vote and let her keep the banner.