schools, better
homes, and a chance for the boy are good bricks to build with in such a
structure as we are rearing. They last. Just now we are laying another
course; more than one, I hope. But even if it were different, we need
not despair. Let the enemy come back once more, it will not be to stay.
It may be that, like Moses and his followers, we of the present day
shall see the promised land only from afar and with the eye of faith,
because of our sins; that to a younger and sturdier to-morrow it shall
be given to blaze the path of civic righteousness that was our dream. I
like to think that it is so, and that that is the meaning of the coming
of men like Roosevelt and Waring at this time with their simple appeal
to the reason of honest men. Unless I greatly err in reading the signs
of the times, it is indeed so, and the day of the boss and of the slum
is drawing to an end. Our faith has felt the new impulse; rather, I
should say, it has given it. The social movements, and that which we
call politics, are but a reflection of what the people honestly believe,
a chart of their aims and aspirations. Charity in our day no longer
means alms, but justice. The social settlements are substituting vital
touch for the machine charity that reaped a crop of hate and beggary.
Charity organization--"conscience born of love" some one has well called
it--is substituting its methods in high and low places for the senseless
old ways. Its champions are oftener found standing with organized labor
for legislation to correct the people's wrongs, and when the two stand
together nothing can resist them. Through its teaching we are learning
that our responsibility as citizens for a law does not cease with its
enactment, but rather begins there. We are growing, in other words, to
the stature of real citizenship. We are emerging from the kind of
barbarism that dragged children to the jail and thrust them in among
hardened criminals there, and that sat by helpless and saw the
foundlings die in the infant hospital at the rate--really there was no
rate; they practically all died, every one that was not immediately
removed to a home and a mother. For four years now a joint committee of
the State Charities' Aid Association and the Association for Improving
the Condition of the Poor has taken them off the city's hands and
adopted them out, and in every hundred now eighty-nine live and grow up!
After all, not even a Jersey cow can take the place of a m