s it was
and is in the lands across the sea that sent him to us. Our slums have
fairly rivalled, and in some respects outdone, the older ones after which
they patterned. Still, there is a difference, the difference between the
old slum and the new. The hopelessness, the sullen submission of life in
East London as we have seen it portrayed, has no counterpart here; neither
has the child born in the gutter and predestined by the order of society,
from which there is no appeal, to die there. We have our Lost Tenth to
fill the trench in the Potter's Field; quite as many wrecks at the finish,
perhaps, but the start seems fairer in the promise. Even on the slums the
doctrine of liberty has set its stamp. To be sure, for the want of the
schooling to decipher it properly, they spell it license there, and the
slip makes trouble. The tough and his scheme of levying tribute are the
result. But the police settle that with him, and when it comes to a
choice, the tough is to be preferred to the born pauper any day. The one
has the making of something in him, unpromising as he looks; seen in a
certain light he may even be considered a hopeful symptom. The other is
just so much dead loss. The tough is not born: he is made. The
all-important point is the one at which the manufacture can be stopped.

So rapid and great are the changes in American cities, that no slum has
yet had a chance here to grow old enough to distil its deadliest poison.
New York has been no exception. But we cannot always go at so fast a
pace. There is evidence enough in the crystallization of the varying
elements of the population along certain lines, no longer as uncertain as
they were, that we are slowing up already. Any observer of the poor in
this city is familiar with the appearance among them of that most
distressing and most dangerous symptom, the home-feeling for the slum that
opposes all efforts at betterment with dull indifference. Pauperism seems
to have grown faster of late than even the efforts put forth to check it.
We have witnessed this past winter a dozen times the spectacle of beggars
extorting money by threats or violence without the excuse which a season
of exceptional distress or hardship might have furnished. Further, the
raid in the last Legislature upon the structure of law built up in a
generation to regulate and keep the tenements within safe limits, shows
that fresh danger threatens in the alliance of the slum with politics.
Only the stro