If, in all the cities, every house that is past repairing could be pulled down or burned up, how great would be the crash, how hea...ven-high the conflagration. It would be a veritable crack of Doom and glare of the Judgment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When society comes to value one child more truly, we shall have, for every community, a country homestead where that child can go,... who needs special encouragement. It will not be a penal place, nor even a place of reform, but it will be held out, rather, as a dear delight and a reward. But when society values the child enough, and realises what the child means to the State, and what the home means to the child, it will provide even better, for then the child will have, in its own home, all that a home should give.... There will be safety. There will be the chance to be well, to be pure; room to grow and breathe in; the sacred privacy of the home circle--all those things that are the birthright of every child. And there will be, in some way, beauty, to which the soul of the child naturally turns, as does a plant to the light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of w...hich Want is the mother. "Miserable" covers many; "shabby" most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, "disagreeable" includes them all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It hurts me to hear the tone in which the poor are condemned as "shiftless," or "having a pauper spirit," just as it would if a cr...owd mocked at a child for its weakness, or laughed at a lame man because he could not run, or a blind man because he stumbled.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of the saddest sights of the slums is to see the thrifty wife of the working man, with her rosy brood of children, used to cou...ntry air and sunshine, used to space, privacy, good surroundings, cleanliness, quiet, shut up amid the noise and dirt and confusion, in the gloom of the slum.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The daily lesson of slum life, visualised, reiterated, of low standards, vile living, obscenity, profanity, impurity, is bound to ...be dwarfing and debasing to the children who are in the midst of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I remembered the rose bush that had reached a thorny branch out through the ragged fence, and caught my dress, detaining me whe...n I would have passed on. And again the symbolism of it all came over me. These memories and visions of the poor--they were the clutch of the thorns. Social workers have all felt it. It holds them to their work, because the thorns curve backward, and one cannot pull away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »