other with a
baby. And we are building a children's court that shall put an end to
the other outrage, for boys taken there are let off on probation, to
give them the chance under a different teaching from the slum's, which
it denied them till now.

[Illustration: Flag-drill in the "King's Garden." The Playground at the
Jacob A. Riis House.]

We have learned that we cannot pass off checks for human sympathy in
settlement of our brotherhood arrears. The Church, which once stood by
indifferent, or uncomprehending, is hastening to enter the life of the
people. I have told of how, in the memory of men yet living, one church,
moving up-town away from the crowd, left its old Mulberry Street home to
be converted into tenements that justly earned the name of "dens of
death" in the Health Department's records, while another became the
foulest lodging house in an unclean city, and of how it was a church
corporation that owned the worst underground dive down-town in those bad
old days, and turned a deaf ear to all remonstrances. The Church was
"angling for souls." But souls in this world live in bodies endowed with
reason. The results of that kind of fishing were empty pews and cold
hearts, and the conscience-stricken cry that went up, "What shall we do
to lay hold of this great multitude that has slipped from us?"

The years have passed and brought the answer. To-day we see churches of
every denomination uniting in a systematic canvass of the city to get at
the facts of the people's life of which they had ceased to be a part,
pleading for parks, playgrounds, kindergartens, libraries, clubs, and
better homes. There is a new and hearty sound to the word "brother" that
is full of hope. The cry has been answered. The gap in the social body,
between rich and poor, is no longer widening. We are certainly coming
closer together. A dozen years ago, when the King's Daughters lighted a
Christmas tree in Gotham Court, the children ran screaming from Santa
Claus as from a "bogey man." Here lately the boys in the Hebrew
Institute's schools nearly broke the bank laying in supplies to do him
honor. I do not mean that the Jews are deserting to join the Christian
Church. They are doing that which is better,--they are embracing its
spirit; and they and we are the better for it.

"The more I know of the Other Half," writes a friend to me, "the more I
feel the great gulf that is fixed between us, and the more profoundly I
grieve that this is the