for the
fitting of nine public schools with shower-baths where we had one
before, and notice is given that that one will be open to the people on
Sunday mornings. No, we are not marking time; we are forging ahead.
Every park, every playground, every bath-house, is a nail in the coffin
of the slum, and every big, beautiful schoolhouse, built for the
people's use, not merely to lock the children up in during certain hours
for which the teachers collect pay, is a pole rammed right through the
heart of it so that even its ghost shall never walk again. For ever so
much of it we thank that association of men of splendid courage and
public spirit. They fight to win because they believe in the people.
They fight _with_ the people and so they are bound to win.

Every once in a while these days a false note in it all jars upon me--a
note of dread lest those we are trying to help get tired of the word
"reform" and balk. Reform such as we have occasionally had is to blame
for some of that. Certainly you do not want to reform men by main
strength, drag them into righteousness by the hair of the head, as it
were. And let it be freely admitted that the man on Fifth Avenue needs
to be reformed quite as much as his neighbor in Mulberry Street whom he
forgot,--more, since it is his will to mend things that has to be
righted, while it is the other's power to do it that is lacking. But
right there stop. Let us have no pretending that there is nothing to
mend. There is a good deal, and it is not going to be mended by stuffing
the one you would help with conceit and ingratitude. Ingratitude does
not naturally inhabit the slums, but it is a crop that is easily grown
there, and where it does grow there is an end of efforts to mend things
in that generation. You do not want to come _down_ to your work for your
fellows, when you go from the brown-stone front to the tenement; but
neither do you want to make him believe that you feel you are coming up
to him, for you know you do not feel that way. And moreover, it is not
true, if you are coming at all. You want to come right _over_, to help
him reform conditions of his life with which he cannot grapple alone,
and it is as good for him, as it is for you to know that you are doing
it. For that is the brotherhood. And now you can see how that is the
only thing that really helps. Charity may corrupt, correction may harden
and estrange,--in the family they do neither. There you can give and
take witho