as been a time in the story of
mankind when hand and brain worked together. In every monument of the
past on this English soil, even at the topmost point of springing arch
or lofty pillar, is tracery and carving as careful and cunning as if all
eyes were to see and judge it as the central point and test of the labor
done. Has the nineteenth century, with its progress and its boast, no
possibility of such work from any hand of man, and if not, where has the
spirit that made it vanished, and what hope may men share of its return?
Not one, if the day's work must mean labor in its most exhausting form;
for many women, fourteen to sixteen hours at the sewing machine, the
nerve-force supplied by rank tea, and the bit of bread eaten with it,
the exhausted bodies falling at last on whatever may do duty for bed,
with no hope that the rising sun will bring release from trial or any
gleam of a better day.

With each week of the long search the outlook became more hopeless. Here
was this army crowding into the great city, packed away in noisome
tenement houses, ignorant, blind, stupid, incompetent in every fibre,
and yet there as factors in the problem no man has yet solved. If this
was civilization, better barbarism with its chance of sunshine and air,
free movement and natural growth. What barbarism at its worst could hold
such joyless, hopeless, profitless labor, or doom its victims to more
lingering deaths? Admitting the almost impossibility of making them
over, incased as they are in ignorance and prejudice, this is simply
another count against the social order which has accepted such results
as part of its story, and now looks on, speculating, wondering what had
better be done about it.

The philanthropist has endeavored to answer the question, and sought out
many devices for alleviation, struggling out at last to the conviction
that prevention must be attempted, and pausing bewildered before the
questions involved in prevention. For them there has been active and
unceasing work, their brooms laboring as vainly as Mrs. Partington's
against the rising tide of woe and want and fruitless toil, each wave
only the forerunner of mightier and more destructive ones, while the
world has gone its way, casting abundant contributions toward the
workers, but denying that there was need for agitation or speculation as
to where or how the next crest might break. There were men and women who
sounded an alarm, and were in most cases either h