f the crimes which disgrace our civilization would be
nipped in the bud. While this continues as it does now, there is no
possibility of a thorough sanitary, moral, and religious reform in our
worst wards.

Few girls can grow up to maturity in such dens as exist in the First,
Sixth, Eleventh, and Seventeenth Wards and be virtuous; few boys can
have such places as homes and not be thieves and vagabonds. In such
places typhus and cholera will always be rife, and the death-rate will
reach its most terrible maximum. While the poorest population dwell in
these cellars and crowded attics, neither Sunday-schools, nor churches,
nor charities, can accomplish a thorough reform.

What, then, is to be done to remedy this terrible evil?

Experience has proved that our remedial agencies can, in individual
cases cure even the evils resulting from this unnatural condensing of
population. That is, we can point to thousands of lads and young girls
who were born and reared in such crowded dens of humanity, but who have
been transformed into virtuous, well-behaved, and industrious young men
and women, by the quiet daily influence of the charitable organization I
am about to describe.

Still, these cases of reform are, in truth, exceptions. The natural and
legitimate influence of such massing of population is all in the
direction of immorality and degeneracy. Whatever would lessen that,
would at once, and by a necessary law, diminish crime and poverty and
disease.

REMEDIES.

The great remedies are to be looked for in broad, general provisions for
distributing population. Thus far, the means of communication between
business New York and the suburbs have been singularly defective. An
underground railway with cheap workman's trains, or elevated railways
with similar conveniences, connecting Westchester County and the lower
part of the city, or suburbs laid out in New Jersey or on Long Island
expressly for working people, with cheap connections with New York and
Brooklyn, would soon make a vast difference in the concentration of
population in our lower wards. It is true that English experience would
show that laboring-men, after a heavy day's work, cannot bear the jar of
railway traveling. There must be, however, many varieties of labor--such
as work in factories and the like--where a little movement in a
railroad-train at the close of a day would be a refreshment.

Then, as the laboring class was concent