That these children are alive at all, that fatherhood and motherhood are allowed to be the right of drunkards and criminals of every grade, is a problem whose present solution passes any human power, but which all lovers of their kind must sooner or later face.  In the mean time the children are with us, born to inheritances that tax every power good men and women can bring to bear.  Hopeless as the outlook often seems, salvation for the future of the masses lies in these children.  Not in a teaching which gives them merely the power to grasp at the mass of sensational reading, which fixes every wretched tendency and blights every seed of good, but in a practical training which shall give the boys trades and force their restless hands and mischievous minds to occupations that may ensure an honest living, while the girls find work from which, with few fortunate exceptions, they are still debarred.

The American distaste for domestic service seems to be shared in even greater degree by the children of foreigners born in this country and to a certain extent Americanized.  The mothers have usually been servants, and still “go out to days’ work,” but, no matter how numerous the family, such life for any daughter is despised and discouraged from the beginning.  Work in a bag-factory or any one of the thousand, but to the employes profitless, industries of a great city is eagerly sought, and hardships cheerfully endured which if enforced by a mistress would lead to a riot.  To be a shop-girl seems the highest ambition.  To have dress and hair and expression a frowsy and pitiful copy of the latest Fifth Avenue ridiculousness, to flirt with shop-boys as feeble-minded and brainless as themselves, and to marry as quickly as possible, are the aims of all.  Then come more wretched, thriftless, ill-managed homes, and their natural results in drunken husbands and vicious children; and so the round goes on, the circle widening year by year till its circumference touches every class in society, and would make our great cities almost what sober country-folk believe them—­“seas of iniquity.”

Happily, to know an evil is to have taken the first step in its eradication.  The work only recently begun—­the past five years having seen its growth from a very humble and insignificant beginning to its present promising proportions—­holds the solution of at least one equation of the problem.  To have made cooking and industrial training the fashion is to have cleared away at a leap the thorny underbrush and tangled growth on that Debatable Ground, the best education for the poor, and to find one’s feet firmly set in a way leading to a Promised Land to which every believer in the new system is an accredited guide.  That cooking-schools and the knowledge of cheap and savory preparation of food must soon have their effect on the percentage of drunkards no one can question; but with them, save indirectly, this present paper does not deal, its object being rather