wo hundred tenements are going up to-day under
the new law, that are in all respects model buildings, as good as the
City and Suburban Home Company's houses, though built for revenue only.
All over the greater city the libraries are rising which, when Mr.
Carnegie's munificent plan has been worked out to the full, are to make,
with the noble central edifice in Bryant Park, the greatest free library
system of any day, with a princely fortune to back it.[42] New bridges
are spanning our rivers, tunnels are being bored, engineers are blasting
a way for the city out of its bonds on crowded Manhattan, devotion and
high principle rule once more at the City Hall, Cuba is free, Tammany is
out; the boy is coming into his rights; the toughs of Hell's Kitchen
have taken to farming on the site of Stryker's Lane, demolished and
gone.

[Footnote 42: The Astor, Lenox, and Tilden foundations represent a
total of some seven millions of dollars. The great central library,
erected by the city, is to cost five millions, and the fifty
branches for which the city gives the sites and Andrew Carnegie the
buildings, $5,200,000. The city's contribution for maintenance will
be over half a million yearly.]

And here upon my table lies a letter from the head-worker of the
University Settlement, which the postman brought half an hour ago, that
lets more daylight in, it seems to me, than all the rest. He has been
thinking, he writes, of how to yoke the public school and the social
settlement together, and the conviction that comes to everybody who
thinks to solve problems, has come to him, too, that the way to do a
thing is to do it. So he proposes, since they need another house over at
the West Side branch, to acquire it by annexing the public school and
turning "all the force and power that is in the branch into the bare
walls of the school, there to develop a social spirit and an enthusiasm"
among young and old that shall make of the school truly the neighborhood
house and soul. And he asks us all to fall in.

I say it lets daylight in, because we have all felt for some time that
something like this was bound to come, only how was not clear yet. Here
is this immense need of a tenement house population of more than two
million souls: something to take the place, as far as anything can, of
the home that isn't there, a place to meet other than the saloon; a
place for the young to do their courting--there is no room for it in