hing or deed that
strikes at the home, for from the people's home proceeds citizen virtue,
and nowhere else does it live. The slum is the enemy of the home.
Because of it the chief city of our land came long ago to be called "The
Homeless City." When this people comes to be truly called a nation
without homes there will no longer be any nation.

[Footnote 2: "The experiment has been long tried on a large scale,
with a dreadful success, affording the demonstration that if, from
early infancy, you allow human beings to _live_ like brutes, you can
degrade them down to their level, leaving them scarcely more
intellect, and no feelings and affections proper to human
hearts."--_Report on the Health of British Towns._]

Hence, I say, in the battle with the slum we win or we perish. There is
no middle way. We shall win, for we are not letting things be the way
our fathers did. But it will be a running fight, and it is not going to
be won in two years, or in ten, or in twenty. For all that, we must keep
on fighting, content if in our time we avert the punishment that waits
upon the third and the fourth generation of those who forget the
brotherhood. As a man does in dealing with his brother so it is the
way of God that his children shall reap, that through toil and tears we
may make out the lesson which sums up all the commandments and alone can
make the earth fit for the kingdom that is to come.

CHAPTER I

BATTLING AGAINST HEAVY ODDS

The slum I speak of is our own. We made it, but let us be glad we have
no patent on the manufacture. It is not, as one wrote with soul quite
too patriotic to let the Old World into competition on any terms, "the
offspring of the American factory system." Not that, thank goodness! It
comes much nearer to being a slice of original sin which makes right of
might whenever the chance offers. When to-day we clamor for air and
light and water as man's natural rights because necessary to his being,
we are merely following in the track Hippocrates trod twenty-five
centuries ago. How like the slums of Rome were to those of New York any
one may learn from Juvenal's Satires and Gibbon's description of Rome
under Augustus. "I must live in a place where there are no fires, no
nightly alarms," cries the poet, apostle of commuters. "Already is
Ucalegon shouting for water, already is he removing his chattels; the
third story in the house you live in is already in a blaze. You