Crooks in action seek crooked houses kept by
crooked men, and they find them along the Bowery more readily than
anywhere. There are the shows and the resorts that draw the young lads,
who, away from home, are all too easily drawn, to their undoing. The
getting them out of their latitude is the greatest gain, and this
service the Mills House performs, to a salutary extent. The more readily
since its fame has gone abroad, and the Mills House has become a type.
There is scarcely a mail now that does not bring me word from some city
in the West or East that a Mills House has been started there in the
effort to grapple with the problem of the floating population. The fear
that their reputation may help increase that problem by drawing greater
crowds from the country is rather strained, it seems to me. The
objection would lie against free shelters, but hardly against a business
concern that simply strives to give the poor lodger his money's worth.
As to him, the everlasting pessimist predicted, when the Mills
Houses were opened, that they would have to "make bathing compulsory."
The lodger has given him the lie; the average has been over 400 bathers
per day,--one in five,--and the record has passed 1000. No doubt soap
may be cheap and salvation dear, but on the other hand cleanliness does
and must ever begin godliness when fighting the slum, and no one who
ever took a look into one of the old-style lodging houses will doubt
that we are better off by so much. The Mills houses have paid four, even
five, per cent on their owner's investment of a million and a half. It
follows that the business will attract capital, which means that there
will be an end of the old nuisance. Beyond this, they have borne and
will bear increasingly a hand in settling with the saloon with which
they compete on its strong ground--that of social fellowship. It has no
rival in the Bowery house or in the boarding-house back bedroom. Every
philanthropic effort to fight it on that ground has drawn renewed
courage and hope from Mr. Mills's work and success.

Many years ago a rich merchant planned to do for his working women the
thing Mr. Mills has done for lonely men. Out on Long Island he built a
town for his clerks that was to be their very own. But it came out
differently. The Long Island town became a cathedral city and the home
of wealth and fashion; his woman's boarding house a great public hotel
far beyond the reach of those he sought to benefit. The