, or build a separate
house, such as they have in Glasgow, for widows with little children,
that shall answer another of our perplexing problems,--a house, this
latter, with nursery, kindergarten, and laundry, where the mother might
know her child safe while she provided for it with her work. Who will be
the D. O. Mills of these helpless ones?

[Illustration: Lodging Room in the Leonard Street Police Station.]

Or is there but one Mills? I have heard it said that he has been
waiting, asking the same question. Let him wait no longer, then, if he
would put the finishing touch to a practical philanthropy that will rank
in days to come with the great benefactions to mankind.

[Illustration: Women's Lodging Room in Eldridge Street Police Station.]

I have dwelt upon the need of bracing up the home, or finding something
to replace it as nearly like it as could be, where that had to be done,
because the home is the key to good citizenship. Unhappily for the
great cities, there exists in them all a class that has lost the key or
thrown it away. For this class, New York, until three years ago, had
never made any provision. The police station lodging rooms, of which I
have spoken, were not to be dignified by the term. These vile dens, in
which the homeless of our great city were herded, without pretence of
bed, of bath, of food, on rude planks, were the most pernicious parody
on municipal charity, I verily believe, that any civilized community had
ever devised. To escape physical and moral contagion in these crowds
seemed humanly impossible. Of the innocently homeless lad they made a
tramp by the shortest cut. To the old tramp they were indeed ideal
provision, for they enabled him to spend for drink every cent he could
beg or steal. With the stale beer dive, the free lunch counter, and the
police lodging room at hand, his cup of happiness was full. There came
an evil day, when the stale beer dive shut its doors and the free lunch
disappeared for a season. The beer pump, which drained the kegs dry and
robbed the stale beer collector of his ware, drove the dives out of
business; the Raines law forbade the free lunch. Just at this time
Theodore Roosevelt shut the police lodging rooms, and the tramp was
literally left out in the cold, cursing reform and its fruits. It was
the climax of a campaign a generation old, during which no one had ever
been found to say a word in defence of these lodging rooms; yet nothing
had availed to cl