derful Jewish family
whose income was seven hundred and ninety-seven dollars and who yet
contrived to save one hundred and twenty-three dollars a year to later
send their two boys to Columbia University.

And everywhere he found the miracle of miracles: the spirit of charity
and mutual helpfulness--the poor aiding the poorer; the exquisite
devotion of mothers to children; the courage that braved a terrible
life.

For a week the canvass went on. Joe worked feverishly, and came home
late at night too tired almost to undress himself. Again and again he
exclaimed to his mother:

"I never dreamed of such things! I never dreamed of such poverty! I
never dreamed of such human nature!"

Greenwich Village, hitherto a shabby red clutter of streets, uninviting,
forbidding, dull, squalid, became for Joe the very swarm and drama and
warm-blooded life of humanity. He began to sense the fact that he was in
the center of a human whirlpool, in the center of beauty and ugliness,
love and bitterness, misery and joy. The whole neighborhood began to
palpitate for him; the stone walls seemed bloody with struggling souls;
the pavements stamped with the steps of a battle.

"What can I do," he kept thinking, "with these people?"

And to his amazement he began to see that just as up-town offered the
rivals of luxury, pleasure, and ease, so down-town offered the rivals of
intemperance, grinding poverty, ignorance. His theories were beginning
to meet the shock of facts.

"How move them? How touch them off?" he asked himself.

But the absorbing interest--the faces--the shadowy scenes--the gas-lit
interiors--everywhere human beings, everywhere life, packed, crowded,
evolving.

At the end of the week he stopped, though the fever was still on him. He
had gained two hundred and fifty subscribers; he had distributed twelve
hundred copies of the paper. He now felt that he could delay no longer
in bringing out the next number. So he sat down, and, with Sally
Heffer's words ringing in his mind, he wrote his famous editorial, "It
is the Women":

It is the women who bear the burden of this world--the poor women.
Perhaps they have beauty when they marry. Then they plunge into
drudgery. All day and night they are in dark and damp rooms, scrubbing,
washing, cooking, cleaning, sewing. They wear the cheapest clothes--thin
calico wrappers. They take their husbands' thin pay-envelopes, and
manage the finances. They stint and save--they bu