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.
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