common sense and the golden rule
obtain among men as a rule of practice, it will be over. The two have
not always been classed together, but here they are plainly seen to
belong together. Justice to the individual is accepted in theory as the
only safe groundwork of the commonwealth. When it is practised in
dealing with the slum, there will shortly be no slum. We need not wait
for the millennium, to get rid of it. We can do it now. All that is
required is that it shall not be left to itself. That is justice to it
and to us, since its grievous ailment is that it cannot help itself.
When a man is drowning, the thing to do is to pull him out of the water;
afterward there will be time for talking it over. We got at it the other
way in dealing with our social problems. The wise men had their day, and
they decided to let bad enough alone; that it was unsafe to interfere
with "causes that operate sociologically," as one survivor of these
unfittest put it to me. It was a piece of scientific humbug that cost
the age which listened to it dear. "Causes that operate sociologically"
are the opportunity of the political and every other kind of scamp who
trades upon the depravity and helplessness of the slum, and the refuge
of the pessimist who is useless in the fight against them. We have not
done yet paying the bills he ran up for us. Some time since we turned
to, to pull the drowning man out, and it was time. A little while
longer, and we should hardly have escaped being dragged down with him.

The slum complaint had been chronic in all ages, but the great changes
which the nineteenth century saw, the new industry, political freedom,
brought on an acute attack which put that very freedom in jeopardy. Too
many of us had supposed that, built as our commonwealth was on universal
suffrage, it would be proof against the complaints that harassed older
states; but in fact it turned out that there was extra hazard in that.
Having solemnly resolved that all men are created equal and have certain
inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness, we shut our eyes and waited for the formula to work. It was
as if a man with a cold should take the doctor's prescription to bed
with him, expecting it to cure him. The formula was all right, but
merely repeating it worked no cure. When, after a hundred years, we
opened our eyes, it was upon sixty cents a day as the living wage of the
working-woman in our cities; upon "knee