tance in all these matters is the reflex action upon the public itself. In the last analysis the public must be the government, and public sentiment will control. Is it not worth while to adopt a scheme of government which will accomplish most in the direction of educating the public itself in the functions of government? Will not this purpose be promoted by a plan under which the public will be able to locate responsibility for governmental action, and by degrees will come to fix that responsibility and distribute rewards and punishments accordingly?

Probably many students of these questions feel that, no matter how serious may be the evils due to the scattering of governmental responsibility, we should encounter even greater evils through the concentration of governmental power. In its last analysis, this fear rests upon the view that the people cannot be trusted with power, and that their use of it ought to be hampered at least to the extent exemplified by our state constitutions. The writer's answer to that view is that, whether one thinks the people ought to be trusted with power or not, the fact is that in the ultimate sense the people have full and complete power

and will exercise it. If this view be correct, the common interest would be promoted by the removal of obstacles to intelligent and efficient action. Certainly no interest can prosper permanently through unintelligent or inefficient governmental activity.

The writer fully appreciates the impracticability of attaining, or even approximating, perfection in any form of government; he understands that much fault-finding exists with governmental results in other countries where methods similar to those here suggested prevail to a greater or less extent; and that the political habits of a century and a half cannot be reconstructed by a constitutional amendment, because all progress in government is a matter of evolution. But in spite of all these considerations it is believed that unnecessary obstacles to improvement ought to be removed. It is believed to be worthy of consideration whether the changes here suggested would not remove serious obstacles and bring substantial improvement, gradually eliminating many long-standing evils and gradually increasing the wisdom and efficiency of public servants together with the wisdom and efficiency of public sentiment.

I

PERHAPS nothing makes a profounder impression on the newcomer to our end of the city than the value placed by the Jew upon education; an overvaluation, one is tempted to think, in view of the sacrifices which are made, particularly for the boys, — though of late years the girls' claims have penetrated even to the Oriental home.

One afternoon a group of old-world women sat in the reception room at the settlement while one of the residents sang and played negro melodies. With the melancholy minor of 'Let My People Go,' the women began crooning a song that told the story of Cain and Abel. The melody was not identical, but so similar that they thought they recognized the song as their own; and when a discussion arose upon the coincidence that two persecuted peoples should claim this melody, the women, touched by the music, confessed their homesick longing for Russia-for Russia that had dealt so unkindly with them.

'Rather a stone for a pillow in my own home,' said one woman on whom life had pressed hard. 'Would you go back?' she was asked. 'Oh, no, no, no!' emphasizing the words by a swaying of the body and a shaking of the head. 'It is not poverty we fear. It is not money we are seeking here. We do not expect things for ourselves. It is the chance

for the children, education and freedom for them.'

The passion of the Russian Jews for intellectual attainment recalls the spirit of the early New England families and their willingness to forego every comfort that a son might be set apart for the ministry. Here we are often witnesses of long-continued deprivation on the part of every member of the family, a willingness to deny themselves everything but the barest necessities of life, that there may be a doctor, a lawyer, or a teacher among them. Submission to bad housing, excessive hours, and poor working conditions is defended as of 'no matter because the children will have better and can go to school maybe college.' Said a baker who showed the ill-effects of basement and night work and whose three rooms housed a family of ten, 'My boy is already in the high school. If I can't keep on, the Herr Gott will take it up where I leave off.'

A painful instance was that of a woman who came to the settlement one evening. Her son was studying music under one of the most famous masters in Vienna, and she had exiled herself to New York in order to earn more money for him than she could possibly earn at home. Literally, as I afterwards discovered, she spent nothing upon herself. A tenement family gave her lodging (a bed on chairs) and food, in return for scrubbing done after her day's work in

the necktie factory. The Viennese master, not knowing his pupil's circumstances, or, it is possible, not caring, had written that the young man needed to give a concert, an additional demand which it was utterly impossible for her to meet. She had already given up her home, she had relinquished her wardrobe, and she had sold her grave for him.

One young lad stands out among the many who came to talk over their desire to go through college. He dreamed of being great and, this period of hardship over, of placing his family in comfort. I felt it right to emphasize his obligation to the family; the father was dead, the mother burdened with anxiety for the numerous children. How reluctant I was to do this he could not realize; only fourteen, he had impressed us with his fine courage and intelligence, and it was hard to resist the young pleader and to analyze with him the commonplace sordid facts. He had planned to work all summer, to work at night, and he was hardly going to eat at all. But his young mind grasped, almost before I had finished, the ethical importance of meeting his nearest duties. He has met the family claims with generosity, and has realized all our expectations for him by acquiring through his own efforts education and culture; and he evinces an unusual sense of civic responsibility.

Those who have had for many years continuous acquaintance with the neighborhood have countless occasions to rejoice at the good use made of the education so ardently desired, and achieved in spite of what have seemed overwhelming odds. New York City is richer for the contributions made to its civic and educational life by the young people who grew up in and with the settlements, and who are not infrequently ready crusaders in social causes. A country gentleman one day lamented

to me that he had failed to keep in touch with what he was pleased to call our humanitarian zeal, and recalled his own early attempt to take an East Side boy to his estate and employ him. 'He could not even learn to harness a horse!' he said, with implied contempt of such unfathomable inefficiency. Something he said of the lad's characteristics made it possible for me to identify him, and I was able to add to that unsatisfactory first chapter another, which told of the boy's continuance in school, of his success as a teacher in one of the higher institutions of learning, and of his remarkable intelligence in certain vexed industrial problems.

Such achievements are the more remarkable because the restricted tenement home, where the family life goes on in two or three rooms, affords little opportunity for reading or study. A vivid picture of its limitations was presented by the boy who sought a quiet corner in a busy settlement. 'I can never study at home,' he said, 'because sister is always using the table to wash the dishes.'

Study rooms were opened in the settlement in 1907, where the boys and girls find, not only a quiet restful place in which to do their work, but also the needed 'coaching.' The school work is supplemented by illuminating bulletins on current topics, and the young student is provided with the aid which in other conditions is given by parents or older brothers and sisters. Such study rooms are now maintained by the Board of Education in numerous schools of the city, 'Thanks to the example set by the settlement,' the superintendent of the New York school system reported.

It is easy to excite sympathy in our neighborhood for people deprived of books and learning. One year I accompanied a party of Northern people to the Southern Educational Conference.

We were all much stirred by the appeal of an itinerant Southern minister who told how the poor white natives traveled miles over the mountains to hear books read. He pictured vividly the deprivation of his neighbors, who had no access to libraries of any kind. When I returned to the settlement and related the story to the young people in the clubs, without suggestion on my part they eagerly voted to send the minister books to form a library; and for two years or more, until the Southerner wrote that he had sufficient for his purpose, the clubs purchased from their several funds one book each month, suited to different ages and tastes, according to their own excellent discrimination.

II

It was logical that my first acquaintance with the public-school system of New York should have come about because of a sore on the head of a small boy. I had been down town only a short time when I met Louis. An open door in a rear tenement revealed a woman standing over a washtub, a fretting baby on her left arm, while with her right she rubbed at the butcher's aprons which she washed for a living.

Louis, she explained, was 'bad.' He did not 'cure his head,' and what would become of him, for they would not take him into the school because of it? Louis, hanging the offending head, said he had been to the dispensary a good many times. He knew it was awful for a twelve-year-old boy not to know how to read the names of the streets on the lamp-posts, but 'every time I go to school Teacher tells me to go home.'

It needed only intelligent application of the dispensary ointments to cure the affected area, and in September I had the joy of securing the boy's admittance to school for the first time in his life. The next day, at the noon

recess, he fairly rushed up our five flights of stairs in the Jefferson Street tenement, to spell the elementary words he had acquired that morning.

It had been hard on Louis to be denied the precious years of school, yet one could sympathize with the harassed school-teachers. The classes were overcrowded; there were frequently as many as sixty pupils in a single room, and often three children on a seat. It was, perhaps, not unnatural that the eczema on Louis's head should have been seized upon as a legitimate excuse for not adding him to the number. Perhaps it was not to be expected that the teacher should feel concern for one small boy whom she might never see again, or should realize that his brief time for education was slipping away and that he must go to work fatally handicapped because of his illiteracy.

The predecessor of our present superintendent had apparently given no thought to the social relationship of the school to the pupils. The general public had no accurate information concerning the schools, and, indeed, seemed to have little interest in them. We heard of flagrant instances of political influence in the selection and promotion of teachers, and later on we had actual knowledge of their humiliation at being forced to obtain through sordid 'pull' the positions to which they had a legitimate claim. I had myself once been obliged to enter the saloon of N, the alderman of our district, to obtain the promise of necessary and long-delayed action on his part for the city's acceptance of the gift of a street fountain, which I had been indirectly instrumental in securing for the neighborhood. I had been informed by his friends that without this attention he would not be likely to act.

Louis set me thinking and opened my mind to many things. Miss Brew