e Church either. God forbid! I would help, not hinder it;
for I, too, am a churchman. Only--well, let it pass. It will not happen
again. That same year I read in my paper the reply of the priest at the
Pro-Cathedral in Stanton Street to a crank who scoffed at the kind of
"religion" they had there: kindergartens, nurseries, boys' and girls'
clubs, and mothers' meetings. "Yes," he wrote, "that is our religion. We
believe that a love of God that doesn't forthwith run to manifest itself
in some loving deed to His children is not worth having." That is how I
came to be a churchman in Bishop Potter's camp. I "joined" then and
there.

Our Italian is ignorant, it is said, and that charge is also true, I
doubt if one of the family in the barge office could read or write his
own name. Yet would you fear especial danger to our institutions, to our
citizenship, from those four? He lives cheaply, crowds, and underbids
even the Jew in the sweat shop. I can myself testify to the truth of
these statements. A couple of years ago I was the umpire in a quarrel
between the Jewish tailors and the factory inspector whom they arraigned
before the governor on charges of inefficiency. The burden of their
grievance was that the Italians were underbidding them in their own
market, which of course the factory inspector could not prevent. Yet,
even so, the evidence is not that the Italian always gets the best of
it. I came across a family once working on "knee-pants." "Twelve pants,
ten cents," said the tailor, when there was work. "Ve work for dem
sheenies," he explained. "Ven dey has work, ve gets some; ven dey
hasn't, ve don't." He was an unusually gifted tailor as to English, but
apparently not as to business capacity. In the Astor tenements, in
Elizabeth Street, where we found forty-three families living in rooms
intended for sixteen, I saw women finishing "pants" at thirty cents a
day. Some of the garments were of good grade, and some of poor; some of
them were soldiers' trousers, made for the government; but whether they
received five, seven, eight, or ten cents a pair, it came to thirty
cents a day, except in a single instance, in which two women, sewing
from five in the morning till eleven at night, were able, being
practised hands, to finish forty-five "pants" at three and a half cents
a pair, and so made together over a dollar and a half. They were
content, even happy. I suppose it seemed wealth to them, coming from a
land where a Parisi