to every thoughtful person, from judge to artisan, from
clergyman to sexton, from editor to reporter, from wealthy matron to
the humble sewing woman. Every earnest thinker knows that there are
evils feeding the furnaces of physical, mental, and moral destruction;
that there are flourishing nurseries, common schools, and universities
of crime, degradation, and death. Yet the great churches slumber on,
their melodious chimes call the self-satisfied to cushioned seats
where are heard expositions of ancient lore and legends of a vanished
past, with incidental and general reference to the conditions of
to-day, enabling the children of wealth, who vainly imagine they are
the disciples of Jesus, to spend a comfortable hour and perchance
contribute to carrying the Gospel to some nature-favored heathen land,
never as yet cursed by rum and other evils which flourish with
tropical luxuriance in all civilized countries, and which ever follow
with blighting, corroding, and life-destroying influence in the wake
of our boasted modern civilization. Two great evils confront every
thoughtful American citizen to-day. One the _oppression of the poor
and the unfortunate_; the other, _the omnipresent cancer spots in
metropolitan life_, the infection of which is reaching the highest
circles of Boulevard society and penetrating the cellars of the
tenement houses. Recently a little work has been published which deals
chiefly with what we may term the "cancer spots of social life" in one
of America's great cities.[5] It is prepared by an earnest Christian
gentleman, who has had a committee of conscientious men and women
investigating the actual conditions in the social cellar of Chicago.
The author states that his purpose is not to show that Chicago is an
exception to the general rule in regard to poverty, crime, or
degradation. He merely desires to indicate deplorable facts as they
exist in this great city to show how dire destitution is working havoc
with the children of men almost under the shadow of the palaces of
those who profess to be Christians. He cites as an illustration of the
extreme poverty in Chicago the fact that when the compulsory education
law went into effect, the inspectors found in the squalid region, a
great number of children so destitute, that they were absolutely unfit
to attend school; decency forbidding that the sexes in _far more than
semi-nude condition should mingle in the school-rooms_, and although a
number of nobl