d
of New York. It would establish, if invested at seven per cent., an
institution that would permanently sustain educating to a virtuous
manhood, two hundred and fifty of the waifs gathered in from the
pollution of the streets, sending forth fifty redeemed ones every year.
When $700,000 is squandered, such is the amount of human life destroyed,
by destroying that for want of which the benevolent are unable to stay
the march of disease, of crime, and of death.

The thought of snatching food from the starving, or turning out
half-clad men and women to perish in the wintry snow, excites our
horror, but which is the greater criminal, he who for avarice thus
destroys one family, or he who in riotous ostentation destroys the means
that would save a hundred lives? Does the fact that they are not in his
presence, or may be a mile or two away, change the nature or results of
his act? And does his accidental possession of the basis of life
authorize him to destroy it?

It is not unreasonable to say that every thousand dollars wantonly
wasted, represents the destruction of the one human life that it would
have saved, and while this slaughter of the innocents proceeds, society
is cursed with the presence of over 100,000 criminals, paupers, tramps,
and vagrants in the State of New York, who might have been reared into
respectable citizenship with a small fragment of the wealth that is
squandered in the hurtful ostentation that panders to a vicious taste.
While poor women in New York are fighting hunger at arm's length, or
looking through ash barrels and offal buckets, their wealthy sisters
think nothing of spending ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on
their toilet, or wearing a $130,000 necklace, or half a million in
diamonds in a Washington court circle,--all of which I hope to see in
time condemned by a purer taste as _tawdry and offensive vulgarity_,
even if it were not done in the presence of misery as it is.
"Twenty-four hours in the slums" (says Julia H. Percy, in the New York
_World_)--"just a night and a day--yet into them were crowded such
revelations of misery, and depravity, and degradation as having once
been gazed upon, life can never be the same afterwards." Such is life in
New York. What it is in "Darkest England," as portrayed by General
Booth, is too wretched and loathsome to be reproduced here. But we must
not fail to understand that five sixths of the people of the
millionaire's metropolis, New York, live