o not know. I did not ask. It was its message to us I was
trying to read. I had been spending weary days and nights in the slums
of London, where hatred grew, a noxious crop, upon the wreck of the
home. Lying there, mute and menacing, the great fist seemed to me like a
shadow thrown from the gray dawn of the race into our busy day with a
purpose, a grim, unheeded warning. What was it? In the slum the question
haunts me yet. They perished, the empires those rock-hewers built, and
the governments reared upon their ruins are long since dead and
forgotten. They were born to die, for they were not built upon human
happiness, but upon human terror and greed. We built ours upon the bed
rock, and its cornerstone is the home. With this bitter mockery of it
that makes the slum, can it be that the warning is indeed for us?

CHAPTER V

"DRUV INTO DECENCY"

I stood at Seven Dials and heard the policeman's account of what it used
to be. Seven Dials is no more like the slum of old than is the Five
Points to-day. The conscience of London wrought upon the one as the
conscience of New York upon the other. A mission house, a children's
refuge, two big schools, and, hard by, a public bath and a wash-house,
stand as the record of the battle with the slum, which, with these
forces in the field, has but one ending. The policeman's story rambled
among the days when things were different. Then it was dangerous for an
officer to go alone there at night.

Around the corner there came from one of the side streets a procession
with banners, parading in honor and aid of some church charity. We
watched it pass. In it marched young men and boys with swords and
battle-axes, and upon its outskirts skipped a host of young roughs--so
one would have called them but for the evidence of their honest
employment--who rattled collection boxes, reaping a harvest of pennies
from far and near. I looked at the battle-axes and the collection
boxes, and thought of forty years ago. Where was the Seven Dials of that
day, and the men who gave it its bad name? I asked the policeman.

"They were druv into decency, sor," he said, and answered from his own
experience the question ever asked by faint-hearted philanthropists. "My
father, he done duty here afore me in '45. The worst dive was where that
church stands. It was always full of thieves,"--whose sons, I added
mentally, have become collectors for the church. The one fact was a
whole chapter on the slum.