mit the breeding ground; to
offer less fruitful soil to the spawn increasing with such frightful
rapidity, and demanding with every year fresh reformatories, larger
asylums and hospitals, more and more machinery of alleviation. Yet the
conviction strengthens that even when the tenement-house of to-day is
swept aside, and improved homes with decent sanitary conditions have
taken their place, that the root of the evil is even then untouched, and
that it lies not alone in their lives, but in our own. And so, as final
word, I say to-day to all women who give their lives to beneficence, and
plan ceaselessly and untiringly for better days, that no beneficence can
alter, no work of our hands or desire of our hearts bring the better day
we desire, till the foundations have been laid in something less
shifting than the sands on which we build.

The mission of alleviation, of protection, of care for the foulest and
lowest of lives, has had its day. It is time that this mass of effort
stirred against its perpetual reproduction, its existence, its ever more
and more shameless demands. An improved home goes far toward making
these tendencies less strong; it may even diminish the number of actual
transgressors; but what home, no matter how well kept, has or will have
power to alter the fact that in them thousands of women must still slave
for a pittance that borders always on that life limit fixed by the
political economists as the vanishing point in the picture of modern
life? Sunlight and air may take the place of the foulness now reigning
in the dens that many of them know as homes; but will either sun or air
shorten hours or raise wages, or alter the fact that not one in a
thousand of these women but has grounded her whole pitiful life on a
delusion,--a delusion for which we are responsible?

Year by year in the story of the Republic, labor has taken lower and
lower place. The passion for getting on, latent in every drop of
American blood, has made money the sole symbol of success, and freedom
from hand-labor the synonyme of happiness. The mass of illiterate,
unenlightened emigrants pouring in a steady stream through Castle Garden
have become our hands, and, as hands dependent on the heads of others,
have fallen into the same category as the slaves, whose possession
brought infinitely more degradation to owners than to owned. It is the
story of every civilized nation before its fall,--this exploitation of
labor, this degradation