sioners of the Board of Health. Hester Street was blockaded by the peddlers. "Meat, four cents a pound"; "Apples, five for a cent"; "Fish, four cents a pound," were common signs. Here are dozens of restaurants where a dinner with fish and two glasses of beer is to be had for thirteen cents. The quality of this food is better imagined than described. And the result of eating such food is a mind and body subject to an insatiable thirst for drink, and this fact makes drunkards of many who would otherwise be sober people. There is an intimate relation between the body and soul, and this question of better food for the poor is a moral question. The chief cause of poverty is drink, but the chief cause of the craving for drink among the poor is lack of healthy food. Napoleon once said, "The soldier has his heart in his abdomen;" and Von Moltke gave emphasis to the moral force of good food when he said, "In a campaign no food is costly except that which is bad."

Philanthropists, investigate this system which grinds human creatures' lives into dust! How long shall this injustice continue upon these helpless foreigners, giving the lie to American freedom? Out upon this corrupting farce! Down with this entirely abominable system! Let our Factory Law be so amended

as to strike directly at tenement factories, and make a new law forbidding the toiler to labor fifteen to eighteen hours a day for the wages of a day, and a blow will be struck at this system from which it will never recover. Our duty is solemn and pressing. The words of the late Cardinal Manning to the Committee of the House of Lords, when investigating the sweaters' dens in London, are applicable here to-day: "If the hours of labor, resulting from an unregulated sale of a man's strength and skill, shall lead to the destruction of domestic life, to the neglect of children, to turning wives and mothers into living machines, and fathers and husbands into creatures of burden, the domestic life exists no longer, and we dare not go on in this path.”

XLI.

THE POOR CHILDREN OF NEW YORK.

"Famine is in their cheeks;

Need and oppression staring in their looks,
Contempt and beggary hang upon their backs."

This is not only poetry, but the fact of thousands of children in New York City; yet the merry laugh, the hearty shout and screams of delight, tell that God made childhood to be happy, and how even misery will forget itself in the buoyancy of youth. Beneath the shaggy bushes of hair and faces pinched with want, behold a sharp intelligence beyond their years. These little street arabs are already masters of imposture, lying, begging, stealing. No blame to them, but much blame to those who neglected them-they had otherwise perished. There is so much misery among New York's poor that we have almost ceased to be astonished at any amount of misery suffered.

We have splendid hospitals and schools where thousands of children are fed and clothed and educated, but what provision have

we made for these children of crime, misery and misfortune? None! I doubt if any pulpit in this city ever thought that this question was important enough for discussion. These homeless and godless poor little ones that we are neglecting into vice and starving into crime should through Christian charity be pressing the narrow path of life. Those cursing little lips should be singing the praises of God. The Spartans who threw their sickly children to the wild beasts were merciful compared with that indifference which in our city gives up the destitute children to be eaten up by their own depravities.

Why are these thousands of children upon the streets and not at school? Listen to the reply: "No room!" If there were room the reply would be of the parents, "Can't afford to keep them there." They must beg, and next thing to begging is stealing. They are cast into prison; the jail brand is on their brow; self-respect is lost; they descend from step to step till they end their unhappy careers, the victims of a poverty for which they were not to blame, and for a neglect on the part of a Christian public for which a righteous God will one day call them to judgment.

If these poor children cannot attend school unless they starve, feed them in order to edu

Pre

cate them. Food is a powerful magnet to draw a hungry child to school. Don't mock with books a child who wants for bread. vention of crime is cheaper than its punishment. There is only one way of securing the amelioration of these outcast children, and that is by making their maintenance a bridge and a stepping-stone to their education. "When thy father and thy mother forsake thee, the Lord will take thee up." How? By putting it into the hearts of his people to do a father's and a mother's part to those who are fatherless and motherless, or to those still more unhappy children who have parents but would be better off if they had none.

Let there be schools for all the children; make education compulsory, and provide the means for the compulsion. Let the schoolhouses be open evenings, and filled with books, papers and games. Put your hands on the hearts of the little ones, surround them with benign and holy influences, and these children, though their knees are now out, their elbows out, their toes out, and their souls Christless, will grow up to be men of might and men of God.