There is an affinity between children and flowers. To me the sight of a blossom often suggests a baby, and the sight of a baby often suggests a favorite flower.

Many a mother singing lullabies to the baby at her breast calls it her “blossom.”

And children, healthy children, are fond of flowers.

I once saw a boy of ten who didn’t know what a flower was. He knew what each card in a pack was, and he wasn’t afraid of a policeman. But he was afraid of a grassy and daisy-spangled field. London had destroyed for him all sense of kinship with Nature.

But most children, even city children, love flowers. The country child loves familiarly as it loves its own mother, but the city child loves and worships. Yesterday I saw a group of little girls with their noses pressed flat against a florist’s window. “My, ain’t they sweet!” they cried in chorus.

If only the flowers could know!

Some sympathetic and leisured ladies have formed themselves into a guild to give such children as I saw at the florist’s window growing flowers to tend and love. I do not know the ladies. We live in the same city, but in a different world.

And yet we have some things in common, these good ladies and I. Perhaps many things, but chief of all a love for children and flowers. In our different worlds, so little alike, this love flourishes with equal freedom. My wife loves blossoms and babies, too, but she is not a member of the guild. Its meetings are not held in our world.

The guild got together 10,000 little children from the tenements of this great city of New York. To each child a potted plant was given, in the hope that its presence would brighten the home, and its care “refine” and “spiritualize” the child.

Good, generous ladies of the guild!

And from each child was exacted the promise that upon a given date at the end of a full year, the plant should be brought back and placed upon exhibition. Ribbons were promised as prizes to those children whose plants should be in the most flourishing condition.

The year passed. The day of the exhibition arrived. Richly gowned women, calling themselves “patronesses,” were there. They went in luxuriously equipped automobiles to smile and be condescending toward children who went in rags and were hungry.

But not all the children to whom the year before they had given flowers were there. Some of them had drooped during the summer and died like flowers in parched ground.

And many of the plants were withered and dead, too.

What an exhibition, to be sure! Geraniums without fragrance. Geraniums which a year ago bore deep, rich, green leaves and bright scarlet blossoms, were now straggling and wretched, with pale-green—almost white—stems, with poor, sickly-looking little leaves and with no flowers. And many a pot containing only a withered and rotted stick, with maybe a little note, “Please, ma’am, it died because our rooms is dark.”

Some of the richly gowned women wept as they looked at the long rows of pitiful flowers, and at the long rows of withered and dead flowers.

Wept? I wonder why.

I wonder if they wept because they began to appreciate faintly how poverty withers and oppresses all life; or only because the sight of so many dead flowers, and flowers worse than dead, overwhelmed them? Or had they heard the flowers tell their sad little histories?

For every one of the flowers had a story to tell to understanding hearts.

Yes, madam, that tall, withered geranium stick, which made you weep as you remembered how beautiful its scarlet blossoms had looked the year before, when you gave it to little crippled Polly with the flaxen hair, could unfold a story, if you could but understand it. But it is a story of the tenement, not of your world. And you cannot understand.

But little Polly (who doesn’t understand either) can tell you enough to give you cause for tears. Real tears. Human tears.

I could tell you, for I know the tenement. It is in my world. But let Polly tell.

“When youse gived us th’ prutty flow’r, leddy, I put ’er in our winder so’s all th’ kids ’ud see from th’ street. An’ mamma wus so proud! An’ me little baby bruver jes’ went wild, leddy. An’ when mamma wus washin’, he’d stay so good and call out, so pert-like, ‘Putty! putty!’ An’ mamma said ‘twus a blessin’, ’cause she wus able to do th’ washin’ when baby wus playin’.

“But when winter comed, leddy, yer flow’r an’ th’ leaves wus all dead like, an’ comed off. An’ me mamma said ’twus th’ cold. An’ when I put ’er by th’ airshaft she said ’twus too dark. An’ so yer flow’r jes’ died like, an’ mamma wus so cut up washin’ days, for me bruver wus teethin’ an’ there warn’t no flow’r.

“But mamma said yer flow’r ’ud come up in th’ summer. So I jes’ kep’ waterin’, an’ when th’ fine days comed I put ’er in our winder again. An’ it growed a bit, leddy, an’ mamma an’ me wus so glad! But ’twus allus growin’ a bit an’ then dyin’ like, ’cause, mamma said, we didn’t git no sun in our rooms. An’ I used to cry in th’ nights ’bout that flow’r, leddy!

“An’ when summer comed an’ folks wus sleepin’ ’pon their fire-’scapes, I put yer flow’r outside an’ watered ’er ev’ry day. But when me little bruver wus sick, an’ th’ doctor said he mus’ go to th’ country somewheres, yer flow’r jes’ died an’ dried up like a stick, leddy. Me little bruver died, too, an’ th’ doctor said he’d ’a’ lived if he’d gone into th’ country.

“I’m sorry, leddy, fur yer flow’r. P’raps ’twus ’cause it never went to no country place. I tried me best, leddy, but—”

No, don’t reproach yourself, madam. You didn’t know. How could you know, living in another world? It was really good of you to think of the tenement children, and to give them your flowers.

Poor little children of the tenements! It was good of you to think of them. Their homes are squalid, and flowers do make the home brighter. And their little lives do need the refining and spiritualizing influence of flowers.

But neither the babies nor the blossoms can flourish there. They pine and droop and die together. True, some of them live—babies and blossoms—but how?

You are a woman and you love children and flowers. Tell me, did not the pale, sickly children and the pale, sickly plants impress you as even more saddening than the dead plants—the constant reminders of dead children?

Their slow, prolonged dying is more terrible than death to me. And I love them both, children and flowers.

I honor your tears. They proclaim you to be possessed of a human heart. But you are a misfit in your sphere. Your place is in our world.

You mean well, but your guild is only a toy. The problem is not to be solved so easily. If you would help solve it, you must give something more than plants. You must give yourself.

And this is the work which calls for your service and sacrifice:—

To bring blossoms and babies together where both can thrive. To restore the child-sense of kinship with Nature, that to every child may come the joy of understanding Nature’s eternal harmonies. To bring the freedom and beauty and companionship of beast and bird, flower and tree, mountain and ocean, stream and star, into the life of every child.

It is a big task, madam; flower shows and ribbons and tears will not fulfil it. If you are serious, you will find more serviceable things to do.

Some there are, the despised builders of Humanity’s temples, who are laboring to give this vast heritage to the children of all the world. They build patiently, for they have faith in their work.

And this is their faith—that the power of the world springs from the common labor and strife and conquest of the countless ages of human life and struggle; that not for a few was that labor and that struggle, but for all. And the common labor of the race for the common good and the common joy will give blossoms and babies the fulness of life which sordid greed with its blight makes impossible.

Are you of the faith of the builders? Are you a builder?