al of oaths and obscenity learned in this Inferno,
which, could it have place by Dante's, might be better known to a
cultured generation. Only a Zola could describe deliberately what any
eye may see, but any minute detail of which would excite an outburst of
popular indignation. Yet I am by no means certain that such detail has
not far more right to space than much that fills our morning papers, and
that the plain bald statement of facts, shorn of all flights of fancy or
play of facetiousness, might not rouse the public to some sense of what
lies below the surface of this fair-seeming civilization of to-day. Not
alone in the shadow of the great pier, but wherever men and women must
herd like brutes, these things exist and shape the little lives that
missions do not, and as yet cannot, reach, and that we prefer to deal
with later, when actual violation of laws has placed them in the hands
of the State. Work as she may, the woman who must find home for herself
and children in such surroundings is powerless to protect them from the
all-pervading foulness. They may escape a portion of the actual
degradation. They can never escape a knowledge the possibility of which
is unknown to what we call barbarism, but part and parcel of the daily
life of civilization.

Granted instantly that only the lowest order of worker must submit to
such conditions, yet we have seen that this lowest order is legion; that
its numbers increase with every day; and that no Board of Health or of
Sanitary Inspectors has yet been able to alter, save here and there, the
facts that are a portion of the tenement-house system.

It is chiefly with the house under the Bridge that we deal at present.
Its upper rooms hold many workers whose testimony has helped to make
plain how the east side lives. Little by little, as the blocks of
granite swung into place and the pier grew, the sunshine vanished, its
warmth and light replaced by the electric glow, cold and hard and
blinding. The day's work has ceased to be the day's work, and the women
who cannot afford the gas or oil that must burn if they work in the
daytime, sleep while day lasts, and when night comes and the electric
light penetrates every corner of the shadowy rooms, turn to the toil by
which their bread is won. Never was deeper satire upon the civilization
of which we boast. Natural law, natural living, abolished once for all,
and this light that blinds but holds no cheer shining upon the mass of
wear