ord scum. If
they aspire to rise, society shrinks from them; they seem of another
world; they are of another world; driven into the darkness of a hopeless
existence, viewed much as were lepers in olden times. Over their heads
perpetually rests the dread of eviction, of sickness, and of failure to
obtain sufficient work to keep life in the forms of their loved ones,
making existence a perpetual nightmare, from which death alone brings
release. Say not that they do not feel this; I have talked with them; I
have seen the agony born of a fear that rests heavy on their souls
stamped in their wrinkled faces and peering forth from great pathetic
eyes. For them winter has real terror, for they possess neither clothes
to keep comfortable the body, nor means with which to properly warm
their miserable tenements. Summer is scarcely less frightful in their
quarters, with the heat at once stifling, suffocating, almost
intolerable; heat which acting on the myriad germs of disease produces
fever, often ending in death, or, what is still more dreaded, chronic
invalidism. Starvation, misery, and vice, trinity of despair, haunt
their every step. The Golden Rule,--the foundation of true civilization,
the keynote of human happiness,--reaches not their wretched quarters.
Placed by society under the ban, life is one long and terrible night.
But tragic as is the fate of the present generation, still more
appalling is the picture when we contemplate the thousands of little
waves of life yearly washed into the cellar of being; fragile, helpless
innocents, responsible in no way for their presence or environment, yet
condemned to a fate more frightful than the beasts of the field; human
beings wandering in the dark, existing in the sewer, ever feeling the
crushing weight of the gay world above, which thinks little and cares
less for them. Infinitely pathetic is their lot.

The causes that have operated to produce these conditions are numerous
and complex, the most apparent being the immense influx of immigration
from the crowded centres of the old world; the glamor of city life,
which has allured thousands from the country, fascinating them from afar
much as the gaudy colors and tinsel before the footlights dazzle the
vision of a child; the rapid growth of the saloon, rendered well-nigh
impregnable by the wealth of the liquor power; the wonderful
labor-saving inventions, which in the hands of greed and avarice,
instead of mitigating the burdens o