passing years
saw his great house, its wealth, its very name, vanish as if they had
never been, and even his bones denied by ghoulish thieves rest in the
grave. There is no more pathetic page in the history of our city than
that which records the eclipse of the house of Alexander T. Stewart,
merchant prince. I like to think of the banker's successful philanthropy
as a kind of justice to the memory of the dead merchant, more eloquent
than marble and brass in the empty crypt. Mills House No. 1 stands upon
the site of Mr. Stewart's old home, where he dreamed his barren dream of
benevolence to his kind.

His work lies undone yet. While I am writing this, they are putting the
roof on a great structure in East Twenty-ninth Street that is to be the
"Woman's Hotel" of the city and bear the name of Martha Washington. It
is intended for business and professional women who can pay from seven
or eight dollars a week up to almost anything for their board and
lodging, and it is expected to fill so great a need as to be
commercially profitable at once. That will be well, and we shall all be
glad. But who will build the Mills House for lonely girls and women who
cannot pay seven or eight dollars a week, and would not go to the
Woman's Hotel if they could? The social cleft between Madison Avenue
and Bleecker Street is too wide to be bridged by the best intentions of
a hotel company. I doubt if they would know where to go in that strange
up-town country. When as an immigrant I paid two dollars a day for board
that was not worth fifty cents, in a Greenwich Street house, I might
have lodged in comfort in a Broadway hotel for less money, had I only
known where. There are hosts of half-starved women and girls living in
cheerless back rooms,--or, rather, they do not live, they exist on weak
coffee or tea, laying up an evil day for the generation of which they
are to be the mothers,--to whom such a house would be home, freedom, and
life. Ask any working girls' vacation society whence the need of their
labor early and late, if not to put a little life and vigor into those
ill-nourished bodies. Ask the priest, or any one who knows the
temptations of youth, how much that bald and dreary life of theirs
counts for in the fight he has on hand. Who will build the working
women's hotel somewhere between Stewart's old store and Twenty-third
Street, east of Broadway, that shall give them their sadly needed
chance? And while about it, let him add a wing