The recent Illinois law, providing that the children of widows may be supported by public funds paid to the mother upon order of the juvenile court, will eventually restore a mother’s care to these poor children; but in the meantime, even the poor mother who is receiving such aid, in her forced search for cheap rent may be continually led nearer to the notoriously evil districts.  Many appeals made to landlords of disreputable houses in Chicago on behalf of the children living adjacent to such property have never secured a favorable response.  It is apparently difficult for the average property owner to resist the high rents which houses in certain districts of the city can command if rented for purposes of vice.  I recall two small frame houses identical in type and value standing side by side.  One which belonged to a citizen without scruples was rented for $30.00 a month, the other belonging to a conscientious man was rented for $9.00 a month.  The supposedly respectable landlords defend themselves behind the old sophistry:  “If I did not rent my house for such a purpose, someone else would,” and the more hardened ones say that “It is all in the line of business.”  Both of them are enormously helped by the secrecy surrounding the ownership of such houses, although it is hoped that the laws requiring the name of the owner and the agent of every multiple house to be posted in the public hallway will at length break through this protection, and the discovered landlords will then be obliged to pay the fine to which the law specifically states they have made themselves liable.  In the meantime, women forced to find cheap rents are subjected to one more handicap in addition to the many others poverty places upon them.  Such experiences may explain the fact that English figures show a very large proportion of widows and deserted women among the prostitutes in those large towns which maintain segregated districts.

The deprivation of a mother’s care is most frequently experienced by the children of the poorest colored families who are often forced to live in disreputable neighborhoods because they literally cannot rent houses anywhere else.  Both because rents are always high for colored people and because the colored mothers are obliged to support their children, seven times as many of them, in proportion to their entire number, as of the white mothers, the actual number of colored children neglected in the midst of temptation is abnormally large.  So closely is child life founded upon the imitation of what it sees that the child who knows all evil is almost sure in the end to share it.  Colored children seldom roam far from their own neighborhoods:  in the public playgrounds, which are theoretically open to them, they are made so uncomfortable by the slights of other children that they learn to stay away, and, shut out from legitimate recreation, are all the more tempted by the careless, luxurious life of a vicious neighborhood.  In addition to the colored