Carroll, who added of Carrollton' to his name, lest the peril of his deed should fall on some one else. Each of those signers took his life in his hand when he signed that document. Gentlemen,' said some one, 'if we don't all hang together, we shall all hang separately.' I was a very little girl when I stood on the platform, dressed in a white frock, with a red, white and blue sash around my waist, and in a shrill, defiant, childish voice, recited before a Fourth of July assembly a ringing speech made in defense of America in Parliament, by that far-seeing statesman, the Earl of Chatham. And indeed," ended the old lady, "three millions of people never did a more magnificent thing than was done when they hurled defiance at King George and the mother country.'

"The Mother Country, God bless her!" says a young fellow fresh from Harvard, with a smile and a wave of the hand at the Colonial Dame.

"Yes," she answers, "we all echo that sentiment now. England and America are the closest of friends. We are mother and daughter. But in my childhood we were still pretty near the time when we had fought one another, and the agitation of the ground-swell had not fully subsided. You children have never kept the Fourth as we did, and I am half afraid that you are so learned in

other things that you do not study your country's history as you ought. It is a history of which we need not be ashamed, and we who are Dames and Daughters are doing our best to preserve noted spots, and keep green the memory of our early heroes. The house in which I was born, I am pleased to tell you, sheltered General Washington many a time, and I have often sat beside a table at which that great man ate his dinner and drank his tea."

Young people are a bit impatient of reminiscences, and when their elders are launched in full tide, the juniors are apt to make their escape. On this occasion, a visiting professor, who happened to be Aunt Sophy's guest, summed up the matter before the group had dispersed by the remark that "this country had possessed a great advantage in her situation and her geographical chances for expansion."

He had recently been interested in the subject of coast survey, and he led the conversation to that interesting theme, whence it branched off into other lines. Undoubtedly the professor was right in his conclusion. We have had room to grow. Our big country with its vast areas of territory has made it impossible for us to live in stagnation. Take, for instance, the not uncommon spectacle of

a young girl calmly accepting the exigencies of a situation for which she has had hitherto no apparent preparation. She is about to marry a young farmer who has gone to the distant West, the real West, beyond the Rockies, to begin a new home in a new part of the country. Western towns spring up with the rapidity of Jack's famous bean stalk. One day there are pioneers and log cabins, the next there are streets populous and busy, there is a library, there are churches and schools The girl goes without a tremour into the sequestered life of the new land. She means to carry with her, as women carry everywhere, the true home atmosphere, and her first little home will not lack dainty touches of refinement, and a few of the trifles that manifest the feminine love of home decoration.

Room to grow is found on the ranch and the prairie and in the mountain lands as it cannot be in the choked existence of the seaport towns. Yet they, too, receive continually new influences, brought hither by the ships that navigate the wide ocean, and as it has been wisely said, "The law of imports and exports is the law of life."

In city or country there must be room to grow, or there will be degeneracy and arrested development. We need great spaces and plenty of

air. True patriotism will recognize this necessity before long, and perhaps instead of exploiting in words there shall be material improvement, and a vital change in the environments that now dwarf and stifle the children of the poor.

In a volume recently published the statement is made that "seventy thousand children in New York City go breakfastless to school every day."

A modification of this heart-rending report is to the effect that while not absolutely without any breakfast, the vast majority of children in the tenement districts of a metropolitan city are habitually under-fed, are fed on poor food and are always hungry. When we are praising our country and singing our patriotic hymns, we cannot ignore the minor strain in which mingles the bitter cry of forlorn and famished childhood. Notwithstanding what is done by charity organizations, by humanitarians, and by the ever-multiplying settlements, there is constantly terrible suffering in the families of the very poor. The newspapers are full of harrowing tales in which there is no leaven of exaggeration. A man goes forth to his daily labour, and in an hour meets with sudden death by accident. In that same hour a babe is born in his home and the new-made mother is a widow with

out a single resource, or money to care for the children already in the home. I have seen a little girl eight years old break into an agony of weeping when told by her teacher in a primary school that she would find little twin sisters at home when she reached there. "What will mamma do?” wailed the little girl, old already and bowed with care; one of the pitiful "little mothers" of the very poor.

The problem of child labour cannot be evaded. It confronts us at every turn.

We are told, and the fact is vouched for in census returns, that eighty thousand children, most of them little girls, are employed in the textile industries of this country. In mills from Maine to Alabama, whoever takes time and pains to investigate, shall see wizened faces and shrunken forms of children from eight to twelve years of age, children who toil painfully the livelong day, who have never had a fair chance in school or on the playground, who are badly clothed, badly lodged and badly fed. At the bar of heaven's justice how shall this nation of ours answer for what it has done in commercial greed to the little ones who have never had room to grow? In the silence of streets deserted at playtime, because the children beyond babyhood are earning pence in