king women is
considered_."

When such self-contradictory "information" is placed before the public
as the fruit of investigation, the question arises whether the
Department of Labor is not one more link in that chain of appliances
for confusing the voter which embraces a dozen State bureaus of
irrelevant reformation created chiefly within the last decade.
Certainly in comparison with the first report of Mr. Wright's
Massachusetts incumbency, the present one indicates a retrogression as
marked as it is injurious.

Defective as it is, however, this information is the latest that we
have, and it indicates terrible poverty among the better situated
manual workers.

The average wages of the employed during employment being decidedly
less than a dollar a day, it is not strange that homelessness grows
and the police department reports:--

"As will be seen, the enormous number of 4,649,660 cheap
lodgings were furnished during the year, to which should be
added the 150,812 lodgings furnished in the station-houses,
making a total of 4,800,472. If tenement-house life leads to
immorality and vice, certainly the fifty-eight
lodging-houses in the Eleventh Precinct, furnishing
1,243,200 lodgings in one year, must have the same or a
worse tendency. Reflection upon the figures contained in the
above will lead to the conclusion that we have a large
population of impecunious people (all males) which ought to
be regarded with some concern. It is shown above that an
average of 13,152 persons, without homes and the influence
of family, lodged nightly in the station-houses, and in
these poorly provided dormitories, an army of idlers willing
or forced. It is respectfully submitted that social
reformers would here find a field for speculation, if not
for considerable activity."

Into whose hands can our half a billion of added wealth have wandered,
that it leaves more than twelve thousand human beings homeless
throughout the year? And is the growth of such poverty, not
retrogression?

It is urged from time to time that New York is no typical study for
American conditions because of the immigration that forever flows
through it, and the abnormally large proportion of the "_un_fittest"
left as our residuum. But in comparison with the armies of the unfit
systematically produced by our industrial system, the stratum of
residuum deposited in the met