Children are entitled to clean streets, but they must be willing to coöperate with the Bureau of Street Cleaning in order to get them. Do you know how they can do this?
Two kinds of dirt soil our city streets--that which is the result of daily traffic and that which comes from carelessness.
If there were only the dirt which comes from the use of the streets, the paid cleaners could easily remove it. Most of the dirt, however, comes because people do not think or care. One little piece of paper, a banana peel, an apple core--how trifling they seem! Yet, suppose each boy and girl of thousands of boys and girls should forget, and should throw something into the street, how littered the streets would be!
The most important of all the things we can do is to remember. “But if I remember and some one else forgets, what then?” you ask. Why, simply remind that person.
The streets of the city belong more to the boys and girls than to the grown folks, because they will use them longer.
If this city is our home, we should keep the streets clean; for the streets are like the hallways of the home, and everyone likes to have a clean home.
[Illustration: WHO WILL SWEEP THIS PILE AWAY?]
Every time we go to school, to the store, to church or Sunday-school, or out to play, we go on the street. The streets are as important as the houses. We could not have our city consist entirely of streets, nor could we have it consist entirely of houses.
Many things have to be built and used together, or in coöperation, to make a city.
All over the country, boys and girls are coöperating with grown people and with city governments in the fight for good, clean streets. Boys and girls are remembering and reminding--they are street inspectors keeping watch over what is their own.
They are learning about these things and thinking about them; when they grow up, they will know how such work should be done.
They are getting their parents interested in the fight for clean streets.
[Illustration: THE PLACE FOR CANDY BAGS IS THE WASTE CAN]
They are seeing that the paper from their own homes is tied up so that it will not blow over the streets, that ashes are not piled up in boxes, and that covers are kept on garbage pails.