A splendid record, when it is
considered that these lads are waifs and strays, homeless and parentless,
jerked out from the very bottom of the Abyss, and forty-nine out of fifty
of them made into men.
Every twenty-four hours in the year Dr. Barnardo snatches nine waifs from
the streets; so the enormous field he has to work in may be comprehended.
The people who try to help have something to learn from him. He does not
play with palliatives. He traces social viciousness and misery to their
sources. He removes the progeny of the gutter-folk from their
pestilential environment, and gives them a healthy, wholesome environment
in which to be pressed and prodded and moulded into men.
When the people who try to help cease their playing and dabbling with day
nurseries and Japanese art exhibits and go back and learn their West End
and the sociology of Christ, they will be in better shape to buckle down
to the work they ought to be doing in the world. And if they do buckle
down to the work, they will follow Dr. Barnardo's lead, only on a scale
as large as the nation is large. They won't cram yearnings for the
Beautiful, and True, and Good down the throat of the woman making violets
for three farthings a gross, but they will make somebody get off her back
and quit cramming himself till, like the Romans, he must go to a bath and
sweat it out.
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