THE "NEW WOMAN" AND HER DEBTS. 669 



* that each year finds increasing numbers of wage-earners who 

 can do nothing well, who have no manual skill to command 

 living wages, who in the best times are on the verge of starva- 

 tion, and at every economic upheaval topple into the abyss of 

 pauperism/' 



Out of 340,000 children of school age in New York city, 50,000 

 are untaught for want of school room, because of ragged clothes, 

 or unwillingness to learn. Twenty-eight thousand more children 

 of school age are employed in stores and factories. 



Who should act for this toiling army of little ones, should 

 guard the human race from degeneration, should demand the 

 enforcement of existing laws and the making of better laws in 

 their behalf, should secure the building of schools, the expendi- 

 ture of more money for kindergartens and primary and industrial 

 education, unless it be intelligent women ? 



Our mission it is, too, to bring about better housing of the 

 poor and the artisan, to insist upon their right to decent dwell- 

 ings, fresh air, pure water and plenty of it, clean alleys and courts 

 and some privacy in their homes conditions without which those 

 engaged in productive industries can with difficulty lead moral 

 and virtuous lives. It is a mistake to suppose that workers and 

 honest poor folk are satisfied with any miserable abode. Many 

 of them are ambitious. They have the home-making instinct and 

 turn their pitifully small resources to admirable account, sur- 

 rounding themselves with dainty neatness and refinements in 

 spite of wretched quarters and overburdened lives. I know 

 whereof I speak, having studied the tenements of every large 

 city and many manufacturing centers in the United States. Not 

 long ago I spent four months in a house-to-house, room-to-room 

 investigation of parts of the most congested "slum" districts of 

 New York and Philadelphia. I visited 1,400 tenements, 1,600 

 families, and 7,250 individuals. 



The woman with liberal training, a competence, and social 

 power is the natural guardian of the civic rights of her humble 

 and ignorant sisters, whose civic wrongs she must also have im- 

 agination enough to discover by putting herself in the needy 

 fellow- creatures' place, bringing to bear upon their problems her 

 own broader insight and nobler vision. To put yourself in an- 

 other's place signifies to empty yourself of self. Use imagination, 

 project yourself for the time being into the life of another. Be a 

 poor man, an ignorant man, with limitations and the scars of suf- 

 fering and want, narrowed by lack of opportunity, perhaps embit- 

 tered by hard treatment and ill success. Be all this, however, 

 plus yourself, your brain, your vitality, plus your enlightened 

 conscience and your big, deep heart. Then indeed we have a 

 man, not a one-sided mortal, rich and learned but nothing else, 



