promise. Charity is forgetting its
petty jealousies and learning the lesson of organization and co-operation.
"Looking back," writes the Secretary of the Charity Organization Society,
"over the progress of the last ten years, the success seems large, while
looking at our hopes and aims it often seems meagre." The Church is coming
up, no longer down, to its work among the poor. In the multiplication of
brotherhoods and sisterhoods, of societies of Christian Endeavor, of
King's Daughters, of efforts on every hand to reach the masses, the law of
love, the only law that has real power to protect the poor, is receiving
fresh illustration day by day.

The Fresh Air Work, the Boys' Clubs, the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, bear witness to it, and to the energy and resources
that shall yet win the fight for us. They were born of New York's plight.
The whole world shares in the good they have wrought.

Kindergartens, industrial schools, baby nurseries are springing up
everywhere. We have children's play-grounds, and we shall be getting more,
if the promised small parks are yet in the future. Municipal progress has
not kept step with private benevolence, but there is progress. New schools
have been built this year and others are planned. We are beginning to
understand that there are other and better ways of making citizens and
voters than to grind them out through the political naturalization mill at
every election. If the rum power has not lost its grip, it has not
tightened it, at all events, in forty years. Then there was one saloon to
every 90.8 inhabitants; to-day there is one to every 236.42.[32] The
streets in the tenement districts, since I penned the first lines of this
book, have been paved and cleaned as never before, and new standards of
decency set up for the poor who live there and for their children. Jersey
Street, Poverty Gap, have disappeared, and an end has been put, for a
time at least, to the foul business of refuse gathering at the dumps.
Nothing stands still in New York. Conditions change so suddenly, under the
pressure of new exigencies, that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with
them. The fact that it is generally business which prompts the changes for
the better has this drawback, that the community, knowing that relief is
coming sooner or later, gets into the habit of waiting for it to come that
way as the natural one. It is not always the natural way, and though
relief comes with