EDUCATIONAL PHILANTHROPY 53 



need of just that sort of social training. It is a curious fact 

 that we are very slow about taking progressive steps for public 

 improvement until we are compelled to. The history of sani- 

 tary improvement in the cities both of Europe and of this coun- 

 try will show that great steps in the direction of sanitary im- 

 improvement have rarely been taken except as the result of 

 some dire plague. Cholera or smallpox has compelled the 

 cities of Europe and America to organize their Ijoards of health 

 and to develop thorough, effective methods for urban sanita- 

 tion. It may be that that will also be true with regard to the 

 moral health of the cit}^ Certainly those who have watched 

 the condition of things on the east side of New York during 

 recent years must have seen that there is a moral contagion 

 and pestilence that comes out of the life of a great tenement 

 district, which in due time, by sure compulsion, will necessitate 

 on the part of the city, either privately or pubhcly, the care- 

 ful, systematic organi2ation of such facilities for social inter- 

 course as shall lead in the direction of intelligence and char- 

 acter instead of toward moral destruction. 



And then, too, educational philanthropy concerns itself 

 quite definitely with experiments in the direction of training 

 for vocation. One of the things that strike you most strongly 

 in the Ufe of a working class district is the fact that boys and 

 girls, as they leave our public schools, have no sort of training 

 to fit them for entering upon some permanent employment. 

 To a very large extent when they leave the grammar schools, 

 they go into some sort of calling which is essentially juvenile. 

 The boys become messenger boys or go into the newspaper 

 or bootblack business, while the girls become cash girls in 

 great stores. The difficult}^ with those callings is, that a young 

 person will follow them for three or four years, and at the end of 

 that time be no farther on in his substantial preparation for 

 a life work than he was at the beginning. It is highly im- 

 portant that we should develop educational resources for 

 training those young people to fulfill some increasing use in 

 hfe. The task of educational philanthropy, wherever it is 

 found, is to a very large extent that of endeavoring to fit boys 

 and girls during the years after the grammar school stage, for 

 taking up some definite industrial career. 



