The people who try to help, who gather up the Ghetto children and send them away on a day’s outing to the country, believe that not very many children reach the age of ten without having had at least one day there.  Of this, a writer says:  “The mental change caused by one day so spent must not be undervalued.  Whatever the circumstances, the children learn the meaning of fields and woods, so that descriptions of country scenery in the books they read, which before conveyed no impression, become now intelligible.”

One day in the fields and woods, if they are lucky enough to be picked up by the people who try to help!  And they are being born faster every day than they can be carted off to the fields and woods for the one day in their lives.  One day!  In all their lives, one day!  And for the rest of the days, as the boy told a certain bishop, “At ten we ’ops the wag; at thirteen we nicks things; an’ at sixteen we bashes the copper.”  Which is to say, at ten they play truant, at thirteen steal, and at sixteen are sufficiently developed hooligans to smash the policemen.

The Rev. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish who set out to walk to the forest.  They walked and walked through the never-ending streets, expecting always to see it by-and-by; until they sat down at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued by a kind woman who brought them back.  Evidently they had been overlooked by the people who try to help.

The same gentleman is authority for the statement that in a street in Hoxton (a district of the vast East End), over seven hundred children, between five and thirteen years, live in eighty small houses.  And he adds:  “It is because London has largely shut her children in a maze of streets and houses and robbed them of their rightful inheritance in sky and field and brook, that they grow up to be men and women physically unfit.”

He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to a married couple.  “They said they had two children; when they got possession it turned out that they had four.  After a while a fifth appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit.  They paid no attention to it.  Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the law so often, came in and threatened my friend with legal proceedings.  He pleaded that he could not get them out.  They pleaded that nobody would have them with so many children at a rental within their means, which is one of the commonest complaints of the poor, by-the-bye.  What was to be done?  The landlord was between two millstones.  Finally he applied to the magistrate, who sent up an officer to inquire into the case.  Since that time about twenty days have elapsed, and nothing has yet been done.  Is this a singular case?  By no means; it is quite common.”

Last week the police raided a disorderly house.  In one room were found two young children.  They were arrested and charged with being inmates the same as the women had been.  Their father appeared at the trial.  He stated that himself and wife and two older children, besides the two in the dock, occupied that room; he stated also that he occupied it because he could get no other room for the half-crown a week he paid for it.  The magistrate discharged the two juvenile offenders and warned the father that he was bringing his children up unhealthily.