ut offence. Children of one Father! Spin all the fine theories
you like, build up systems of profound philosophy, of social ethics, of
philanthropic endeavor; back to that you get--if you get anywhere at
all.

I did not mean to preach, I was just thinking that the Association for
Improving the Condition of the Poor, in its fifty years of battling with
all that makes the slum, has come nearer that ideal than any and all the
rest of us. And the president of it these ten years, the same who with
his brother tried to reform Gotham Court, is the head, too, of the
citizens' union which is the whole reform programme in a nutshell. All
of which is as it ought to be.

To return to the East Side where the light was let in. Bone Alley
brought thirty-seven dollars under the auctioneer's hammer. Thieves'
Alley, in the other park down at Rutgers Square, where the police
clubbed the Jewish cloakmakers a few years ago for the offence of
gathering to assert their right to "being men, live the life of men," as
some one who knew summed up the labor movement, brought only seven
dollars, and the old Helvetia House, where Boss Tweed and his gang met
at night to plan their plundering raids on the city's treasury, was
knocked down for five. Kerosene Row, in the same block, did not bring
enough to have bought kindling wood with which to start one of the
numerous fires that gave it its bad name. It was in Thieves' Alley that
the owner in the days long gone by hung out the sign, "No Jews need
apply." I stood and watched the opening of the first municipal
playground upon the site of the old alley, and in the thousands that
thronged street and tenements from curb to roof with thunder of
applause, there were not twoscore who could have found lodging with the
old Jew-baiter. He had to go with his alley, before the better day could
bring light and hope to the Tenth Ward.

What became of the people who were dispossessed? The answer to that is
the reply, too, to the wail that goes up from the speculative builder
every time we put the screws on the tenement house law. It does not pay
him to build any more, he says. But when the multitudes of Mulberry
Bend, of Hester Street, and of the Bone Alley Park were put out, there
was more than room enough for them in new houses ready for their use. In
the Seventh, Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth, and Seventeenth wards, where
they would naturally go if they wanted to be near home, there were 4268
vacant apartments w