is over. A fresh sensation wipes out all
trace of the transient feeling, and though it may again be roused by
judicious effort, how rarely is it that more than the automatic movement
toward the pocket results! What might come if for even one hour the
impatient giver walked through the dark passages, stood in the foul,
dimly lighted rooms and saw what manner of creature New York nourishes
in her slums, giving to every child in freest measure that training in
all foulness that eye or ear or mind can take in that will fit it in
time for the habitation in prison or reformatory on which money is never
spared,--who shall say? They are filled by free choice, these nests of
all evil. The men and women who herd in them know nothing better;
indeed, may have known something even worse. They are Polish Jews,
Bohemians, the lowest order of Italians, content with unending work,
the smallest wage, and an order of food that the American, no matter how
low he may be brought, can never stomach. Yet they assimilate in one
point, being as bent upon getting on as the most determined American,
and accepting to this end conditions that seem more those of an Inferno
than anything the upper world has known. It is among these people,
chiefly Polish Jews and Bohemians, with the inevitable commixture of
Irish, that one finds the worst forms of child-labor; children that in
happy homes are still counted babies here in these dens beginning at
four or five to sew on buttons or pick out threads.

It is not of child-labor and the outrages involved in it that I speak
to-day, save indirectly, as it forms part of the mass of evil making up
the present industrial system and to be encountered at every turn by the
most superficial investigation. It is rather of certain specific
conditions, found at many points in tenement-house life, but never in
such accumulated degree of vileness at any point save one outside the
Fourth Ward. And if the reader, like various recent correspondents, is
disposed to believe that I am merely "making up a case," using a little
experience and a great deal of imagination, I refer him or her to the
forty-third annual report of the New York Association for the
Improvement of the Condition of the Poor. There, in detail to a degree
impossible here, will be found the official report of the inspector
appointed to examine the conditions of life in the building known as
"The Big Flat," in Mulberry Street. There are smaller houses that are