his is the sore spot, and as
against it all the rest seems often enough unavailing. Yet it cannot be.
It is true that the home, about which all that is to work for permanent
progress must cluster, is struggling against desperate odds in the
tenement, and that the struggle has been reflected in the morals of the
people, in the corruption of the young, to an alarming extent; but it
must be that the higher standards now set up on every hand, in the
cleaner streets, in the better schools, in the parks and the clubs, in
the settlements, and in the thousand and one agencies for good that
touch and help the lives of the poor at as many points, will tell at no
distant day, and react upon the homes and upon their builders. In fact,
we know it is so from our experience last fall, when the summons to
battle for the people's homes came from the young on the East Side. It
was their fight for the very standards I spoke of, their reply to the
appeal they made to them.

To any one who knew that East Side ten years ago, the difference
between that day and this in the appearance of the children whom he sees
there must be striking. Rags and dirt are now the exception rather than
the rule. Perhaps the statement is a trifle too strong as to the dirt;
but dirt is not harmful except when coupled with rags; it can be washed
off, and nowadays is washed off where such a thing would have been
considered affectation in the days that were. Soap and water have worked
a visible cure already that goes more than skin-deep. They are moral
agents of the first value in the slum. And the day is coming soon now,
when with real rapid transit and the transmission of power to suburban
workshops the reason for the outrageous crowding shall cease to exist.
It has been a long while, a whole century of city packing, closer and
more close; but it looks as if the tide were to turn at last. Meanwhile,
philanthropy is not sitting idle and waiting. It is building tenements
on the humane plan that lets in sunshine and air and hope. It is putting
up hotels deserving of the name for the army that but just now had no
other home than the cheap lodging houses which Inspector Byrnes fitly
called "nurseries of crime." These also are standards from which there
is no backing down, even if coming up to them is slow work: and they are
here to stay, for they pay. That is the test. Not charity, but
justice,--that is the gospel which they preach.

[Illustration: A Mulberry Bend Alle