not heard it? It
is the charity of the tenement that covers a multitude of sins. There
were thirteen in this policeman's family, and his wages were the biggest
item of income in the house.

Jealousy, envy, and meanness wear no fine clothes and masquerade under
no smooth speeches in the slums. Often enough it is the very nakedness
of the virtues that makes us stumble in our judgment. I have in mind
the "difficult case" that confronted some philanthropic friends of mine
in a rear tenement on Twelfth Street, in the person of an aged widow,
quite seventy I should think, who worked uncomplainingly for a sweater
all day and far into the night, pinching and saving and stinting
herself, with black bread and chickory coffee as her only fare, in order
that she might carry her pitiful earnings to her big, lazy lout of a son
in Brooklyn. He never worked. My friends' difficulty was a very real
one, for absolutely every attempt to relieve the widow was wrecked upon
her mother heart. It all went over the river. Yet would you have had her
different?

Sometimes it is only the unfamiliar setting that shocks. When an East
Side midnight burglar, discovered and pursued, killed a tenant who
blocked his way of escape, not long ago, his "girl" gave him up to the
police. But it was not because he had taken human life. "He was good to
me," she explained to the captain whom she told where to find him, "but
since he robbed the church I had no use for him." He had stolen, it
seems, the communion service in a Staten Island church. The thoughtless
laughed. But in her ignorant way she was only trying to apply the
ethical standards she knew. Our servant, pondering if the fortune she
was told is "real good" at fifteen cents, when it should have cost her
twenty-five by right, only she told the fortune-teller she had only
fifteen, and lied in telling, is doing the same after her fashion.
Stunted, bemuddled, as their standards were, I think I should prefer to
take my chances with either rather than with the woman of wealth and
luxury who gave a Christmas party to her lap-dog, as on the whole the
sounder and by far the more hopeful.

All of which is merely saying that the country is all right, and the
people are to be trusted with the old faith in spite of the slum. And it
is true, if we remember to put it that way,--in spite of the slum. There
is nothing in the slum to warrant that faith save human nature as yet
uncorrupted. How long it is to remain so