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When it comes to the child population of the poor Jewish tenements, we have at last something definite to reckon with. We know from the police census that there were, in 1890, 160,708 children under five years in all the tenements of the city, which is not saying that there were so many poor children by a good many thousand. But how many of them were Italians, how many Bohemians, how many of Irish or German descent, we are yet left to guess. It is different with these. A census, that was taken for a special purpose, of the Jews in the East Side sweaters' district, several years ago, gave a total of 23,405 children under six years, and 21,285 between six and fourteen, in a population of something- over a hundred and eleven thousand that inhabited forty-five streets in the Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth Wards. All of these were foreigners, most of them Russian, Polish, and Roumanian Jews, and they are by all odds the hardest-worked and, barring the Bohemians, as a class, the poorest of our people. According to the record, scarce one-third of the heads of families had become naturalized citizens, though the average of their stay in the United States was between nine and ten years. The very language of our country was to them a strange tongue, understood and spoken by only 15,837 of the fifty thousand and odd adults enumerated. Seven thousand of the rest spoke only German, five thousand Russian, and over twenty-one thousand could only make themselves understood to each other, never to the world around them, in the strange jargon that passes for Hebrew on the East Side, but is really a mixture of a dozen known dialects and tongues, and of some that were never known or heard anywhere else. In the census it is down as just what it is -- jargon, and nothing else.

Here, then, are conditions as unfavorable to the satisfactory, even safe, development of child life in the chief American city, as could well be imagined, more unfavorable even than with the Bohemians, who have at least their faith in common with us, if safety lies in the merging through the rising generation of the discordant elements into a common harmony. A community set apart, set sharply against the rest in every clashing interest, social and industrial; foreign in language, in faith, and in tradition; repaying dislike with distrust; expanding under the new relief from oppression in the unpopular qualities of greed and contentiousness fostered by ages of tyranny unresistingly borne. But what says the record of this? That of the sixty thousand children, including the fifteen thousand young men and women over fourteen who earn a large share of the money that pays for rent and food, and the twenty-three thousand toddlers under six years, fully one-third go to school. Deducting the two extremes, little more than a thou- sand children of between six and fourteen years, that is, of school age, were put down as receiving no instruction at the time the census was taken; nor is it at all likely that this condition was permanent in the case of the greater number of these. The poorest Hebrew knows -- the poorer he is, the better he knows it -- that knowledge is power, and power as the means of getting on in the world that has spurned him so long, is what his soul yearns for. He lets no opportunity slip to obtain it. Day and night-schools are crowded with his children, who learn rapidly and with ease. Every synagogue, every second rear tenement or dark back-yard, has its school and its school-master, with his scourge to intercept those who might otherwise escape. In the census there are put down 251 Jewish teachers as living in these tenements, nearly all of whom probably conduct such schools, so that, as the children form always more than one-half (1) of the population in the Jewish quarter, the evidence is, after all, that even here, with the tremendous inpour of a destitute, ignorant people, the cause of progress along the safe line is holding its own. It is true that these tenement schools which absorb several thousand children are not what they might be from a sanitary point of view. It is also true that heretofore they have mainly been devoted to teaching East-Side Hebrew and the Talmud. But to the one evil the health authorities have recently been aroused; of the other, the wise and patriotic men who are managing the Baron de Hirsch charity are making a useful handle by gathering the teachers in and setting them to learn English. Their new knowledge will soon be reflected in their teaching, and the Hebrew schools become primary classes in the system of public education. The school in a Hester Street tenement that is shown in the picture is a fair specimen of its kind -- by no means one of the worst -- and so is the back-yard behind it, that serves as the children's playground, with its dirty mud-puddles, its slop-barrels and broken flags, and its foul tenement-house surroundings. Both fall in well with the home lives and environment of the unhappy little wretches whose daily horizon they limit. Missionaries though they truly be, like their Italian playmates, in a good cause, they have not even the satisfaction of knowing it. Born to toil and trouble, they claim their heritage early and part with it late. What time they do not spend on the school-bench is soon put to use in the home workshop. When, in the midnight hour, the noise of the sewing-machine was stilled at last, I have gone the rounds with the sanitary police and counted often four, five, and even six of the little ones in a single bed, sometimes a shake-down on the hard floor, often a pile of half- finished clothing brought home from the sweater, in the stuffy rooms of their tenements. In one I visited very lately, the only bed was occupied by the entire family, lying lengthwise and crosswise, literally in layers, three children at the feet, all except a boy of ten or twelve, for whom there was no room. He slept with his clothes on to keep him warm, in a pile of rags just inside the door. It seemed to me impossible that families of children could be raised at all in such dens as I had my daily and nightly walks in. And yet the vital statistics and all close observation agree in allotting to these Jews even an unusual degree of good health. Their freedom from enfeebling vices and the marvellous vitality of the race must account for this. Their homes, or their food, which is frequently of the worst because cheapest, assuredly do not.