ropolis by the flood of immigration
rolling westward, is too trivial to disturb the equanimity of candid
observers. Only the perverted vision which leads New York's most
famous charitable institutions to imprison beggars and kidnap the
children of the very poor in the name of philanthropy, can so confuse
cause and effect. If we were civilized, if we were doing the nation's
work in an orderly manner, every recruit would be so much clear gain.
It is the disorganization of our moribund industrial system which
leaves no welcome for the immigrants save as the tenement-house agent
may bleed them, and the sweating contractor "grind their bones to make
his bread." It is this disorganization which turns the source of our
finest reinforcement into a means of demoralization and temporary
retrogression.

We have seen that in accumulated wealth, the city of New York
increased by nearly half a billion dollars in the past ten years. A
fair share of this material wealth was doubtless derived from the
application of electricity to human uses, for that was pre-eminently
the decade of electricity.

Yet, even in this respect the metropolis failed to hold its own. For,
while the substitution of electricity for horse power has gone rapidly
forward in the small cities of the West and South, New York has
suffered an extension of its slow, filthy, and pest-breeding
horse-car transportation. There can be little doubt that the
unspeakable state of the streets contributed largely to the deadliness
of the epidemic which raged at the close of 1889.

Nor was the electric lighting of New York more successfully developed
than the use of electricity for transportation. The last night of the
ten years found the city buried in stygian gloom, because the duty of
lighting its streets is still a matter of private profit; and the
insolent corporation which fattens upon this franchise surrendered the
privilege of murdering its linemen unpunished, only when its poles
were cut and its wires torn down. A more classic application of the
Vanderbilt motto in action it would be hard to find, or a more
thorough demonstration of the inadequacy of capitalism to rule the
genii itself has summoned. Characteristic of the low plane of humane
feeling in State and city is the substitution of the electrician for
the hangman in judicial murder, at a time when the effort is general
upon the Eastern Continent to abolish capital punishment.

As the application of electricity