ements, all alike and all equally repellent, of the
up-town streets, it is hard to imagine. Hell's Kitchen in its ancient
wickedness was picturesque, at least, with its rocks and its goats and
shanties. Since the negroes took possession it is only dull, except
when, once in a while, the remnant of the Irish settlers make a stand
against the intruders. Vain hope! Perpetual eviction is their destiny.
Negro, Italian, and Jew, biting the dust with many a bruised head under
the Hibernian's stalwart fist, resistlessly drive him before them,
nevertheless, out of house and home. The landlord pockets the gate
money. The old robbery still goes on. Where the negro pitches his tent,
he pays more rent than his white neighbor next door, and is a better
tenant. And he is good game forever. He never buys the tenement, as the
Jew or the Italian is likely to do when he has scraped up money enough
to reenact, after his own fashion, the trick taught him by his
oppressor. The black column has reached the hundredth street on the East
Side, and the sixties on the West,[19] and there for the present it
halts. Jammed between Africa, Italy, and Bohemia, the Irishman has
abandoned the East Side up-town. Only west of Central Park does he yet
face his foe, undaunted in defeat as in victory. The local street
nomenclature, in which the directory has no hand,--Nigger Row, Mixed Ale
Flats, etc.,--indicates the hostile camps with unerring accuracy.

[Footnote 19: There is an advanced outpost of blacks as far up as
One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street, but the main body lingers yet
among the sixties.]

Up-town or down-town, as the tenements grow taller, the thing that is
rarest to find is the home of the olden days, even as it was in the
shanty on the rocks. "No home, no family, no manhood, no patriotism!"
said the old Frenchman. Seventy-seven per cent of their young prisoners,
say the managers of the state reformatory, have no moral sense, or next
to none. "Weakness, not wickedness, ails them," adds the prison
chaplain; no manhood, that is to say. It is the stamp of the home that
is lacking, and we need to be about restoring it, if we would be safe.
Years ago, roaming through the British Museum, I came upon an exhibit
that riveted my attention as nothing else had. It was a huge stone arm,
torn from the shoulder of some rock image, with doubled fist and every
rigid muscle instinct with angry menace. Where it came from or what was
its story I d