hem in a language they
understood. The brass bands and the hand-organs, the street cries and
the rush and roar of the city, had made them forget their childhood's
tongue. For the children understood, even in the gutter.

"It means, I suppose," said Dr. Gould to me, when we had talked it all
over, "that we are and always shall be a tenement house city, and that
we have got to reckon with and plan for that only."

I think not. I believe he is mistaken. And yet I can give no other
ground for my belief than my unyielding faith that things will come
right yet, if it does take time. They are not right as they are. Man is
not made to be born and to live all his life in a box, packed away with
his fellows like so many herring in a barrel. He is here in this world
for something that is not attained in that way; but is, if not attained,
at least perceived when the daisies and the robins come in. If to help
men perceive it is all we can do in our generation, that is a good deal.
But I believe that before our children have come to the divide, perhaps
before we are gone, we shall see the tide of the last century's drift to
the cities turn, under the impulse of the new forces that are being
harnessed for man's work, and Homewood come to its rights, I say I
believe it I wish I could say I knew; but then you would ask for my
proofs, and I haven't any. For all that, I still believe it.

Meanwhile Dr. Gould's advice is good sense. If he is right, it is of the
last importance; if I am right, it is still the way to proving me so by
holding on to what is left of the home in the tenement and making the
most of it. That we have taken the advice is good ground for hope, in
the face of the fact that New York has still the worst housing in the
world. We can now destroy what is not fit to stand. We have done it, and
the republic yet survives. The slum landlord would have had us believe
that it must perish with his rookeries. We are building model tenements
and making them pay. Alfred T. White's Riverside tenements are as good
to-day as when they were built a dozen years ago--better if anything,
for they were honestly built--and in all that time they have paid five
and six per cent, and even more. Dr. Gould found that only six per cent
of all the great model housing operations which he examined for the
government here and abroad had failed to pay. All the rest were
successful. And by virtue of the showing we have taken the
twenty-five-foot lot i