their heads and work-distorted hands sit beside mothers in Parisian costumes, and the silk-clad woman is generally clever enough to appreciate and to admire the spirit which strengthened her weary neighbor through all the years of self-denial, labor, poverty and often hunger, which were necessary to pay for the leisure and the education of son or daughter.  The feeling of inferiority, of uselessness, which this realization entails may humiliate the idle woman but it is bound to do her good.  It will certainly deprive her conversation of sweeping criticisms on lives and conditions unknown to her.  It will also utterly do away with many of her prejudices against the foreigner and it will make the “Let them eat cake” attitude impossible.

And so the child, the parent, the teacher and the home-staying relative are brought to feel their kinship with all the world through the agency of the public school, but the teacher learns the lesson most fully, most consciously.  The value to the cause of peace and good-will in the community of an army of thousands of educated men and women holding views such as these cannot easily be over-estimated.  The teachers, too, are often aliens and nearly always of a race different from their pupils, yet you will rarely meet a teacher who is not delighted with her charges.

“Do come,” they always say, “and see my little Italians, or Irish, or German, or picaninnies; they are the sweetest little things,” or, if they be teachers of a higher grade, “They are the cleverest and the most charming children.”  They are all clever in their different ways, and they are all charming to those who know them, and the work of the public school is to make this charm and cleverness appreciated, so that race misunderstandings in the adult populations may grow fewer and fewer.

The only dissatisfied teacher I ever encountered was a girl of old Knickerbocker blood, who was considered by her relatives to be too fragile and refined to teach any children except the darlings of the upper West side, where some of the rich are democratic enough to patronize the public school.  From what we heard of her experiences, “patronize” is quite the proper word to use in this connection.  A group of us, classmates, had been comparing notes and asked her from what country her charges came.  “Oh, they are just kids,” she answered dejectedly, “ordinary every-day kids, with Dutch cut hair, Russian blouses, belts at the knee line, sandals, and nurses to convey them to and from school.  You never saw anything so tiresome.”

It grew finally so tiresome that she applied for a transfer, and took the Knickerbocker spirit down to the Jewish quarter, where it gladdened the young Jacobs, Rachaels, Isadors and Rebeccas entrusted to her care.  Her place among the nursery pets was taken by a dark-eyed Russian girl, who found the uptown babies, the despised “just kids,” as entertaining, as lovable, and as instructive as the Knickerbocker girl found