iscussion of what, to many good men and women,
seems the only safety for human kind; but to one who studies the
question somewhat at least with the eyes of the physician, it becomes
certain that no "thou shalt not" will ever give birth to either
conscience or love of goodness and purity and decent living, or any
other good that man must know; and that till the Church learns this, her
hold on men and women will lessen, year by year. Every fresh institution
in the miles of asylums and hospitals that cover the islands of the East
River, and stretch on farther and farther with every year, is an added
disgrace, an added count in the indictment against modern civilization.
There are moments when the student of social conditions abhors
Philanthropy; when a disaster that would wipe out at one stroke every
institution the city treasures would seem a gift straight from God, if
only thereby the scales might fall from men's eyes, and they might learn
that hiding foulness in an asylum is not extirpation; that something
deeper and stronger than Philanthropy must work, before men can be
saved.

It is as student, not as professional philanthropist, that I write; and
the years that have brought experience have brought also a conviction,
sharpened by every fresh series of facts, that no words, no matter what
fire of fervor may lie behind, can make plain the sorrow of the poor. To
ears that will hear, to souls that seek forever some way that may help
in truth and not in name, even to them it loses power at moments. To
souls that sit at ease and leave to "the power that works for
righteousness" the evolution of humanity from its prison of poverty and
ignorance and pain, it is quite useless to speak. They have their
theory, and the present civilization contents them. But for the men and
women who are neither Georgeites merely, nor philanthropists merely, nor
certain that any sect or creed or ism will help, but who know that the
foulest man is still brother, and the wretchedest, weakest woman still
sister, whose shame and sorrow not only bear a poison that taints all
civilization, but are forever our shame and our sorrow till the world is
made clean,--for these men and women I write, not what I fancy, but what
I see and know.

Most happily for humanity, they are stronger, more numerous, with every
year; but the hardest fact for them remains ever that their battle is a
double one, and that, exhausted as they may be with long conflict
agains