ry one from the barge office, where I had
gone to see an Italian steamer come in. A family sat apart, ordered to
wait by the inspecting officer; in the group was an old man, worn and
wrinkled, who viewed the turmoil with the calmness of one having no
share in it. The younger members formed a sort of bulwark around him.

"Your father is too old to come in," said the official.

[Illustration: "Are we not young enough to work for him?"]

Two young women and a boy of sixteen rose to their feet at once. "Are
not we young enough to work for him?" they said. The boy showed his
strong arms.

It is charged against this Italian immigrant that he is dirty, and the
charge is true. He lives in the darkest of slums, and pays rent that
ought to hire a decent flat. To wash, water is needed; and we have a law
which orders tenement landlords to put it on every floor, so that their
tenants may have the chance. And it is not yet half a score years since
one of the biggest tenement-house landlords in the city, the wealthiest
church corporation in the land, attacked the constitutionality of this
statute rather than pay two or three hundred dollars for putting water
into two old buildings, as the Board of Health had ordered, and so came
near upsetting the whole structure of tenement-house law upon which our
safety depends. Talk about the Church and the people; that one thing did
more to drive them apart than all the ranting of atheists that ever
were. Yesterday a magazine came in the mail in which I read: "On a
certain street corner in Chicago stands a handsome church where hundreds
of worshippers gather every Sabbath morning for prayer and praise. Just
a little way off, almost within the shadow of its spire, lived, or
rather herded, in a dark, damp basement, a family of eight--father,
mother, and six children. For all the influence that the songs or the
sermons or the prayers had upon them they might have lived there and
died like rats in a hole. They did not believe in God, nor heaven, nor
hell, other than that in which they lived. Church-goers were to them a
lot of canting hypocrites who wrapped their comfortable robes about them
and cared nothing for the sufferings of others. Hunger and misery were
daily realities."

No, it was not a yellow newspaper. It was a religious publication, and
it told how a warm human love did find them out, and showed them what
the Church had failed to do--what God's love is like. And I am not
attacking th