insurance as I had seen it among the people of that dream
land, each of whom, by virtue merely of his membership in the national
family, was guaranteed against need of any sort, by a policy
underwritten by one hundred million fellow countrymen.

Some time after this it was that I recall a glimpse of myself standing
on the steps of a building on Tremont Street, looking at a military
parade. A regiment was passing. It was the first sight in that dreary
day which had inspired me with any other emotions than wondering pity
and amazement. Here at last were order and reason, an exhibition of
what intelligent cooperation can accomplish. The people who stood
looking on with kindling faces,--could it be that the sight had for
them no more than but a spectacular interest? Could they fail to see
that it was their perfect concert of action, their organization under
one control, which made these men the tremendous engine they were, able
to vanquish a mob ten times as numerous? Seeing this so plainly, could
they fail to compare the scientific manner in which the nation went to
war with the unscientific manner in which it went to work? Would they
not query since what time the killing of men had been a task so much
more important than feeding and clothing them, that a trained army
should be deemed alone adequate to the former, while the latter was
left to a mob?

It was now toward nightfall, and the streets were thronged with the
workers from the stores, the shops, and mills. Carried along with the
stronger part of the current, I found myself, as it began to grow dark,
in the midst of a scene of squalor and human degradation such as only
the South Cove tenement district could present. I had seen the mad
wasting of human labor; here I saw in direst shape the want that waste
had bred.

From the black doorways and windows of the rookeries on every side came
gusts of fetid air. The streets and alleys reeked with the effluvia of
a slave ship's between-decks. As I passed I had glimpses within of pale
babies gasping out their lives amid sultry stenches, of hopeless-faced
women deformed by hardship, retaining of womanhood no trait save
weakness, while from the windows leered girls with brows of brass. Like
the starving bands of mongrel curs that infest the streets of Moslem
towns, swarms of half-clad brutalized children filled the air with
shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among the garbage that
littered the court-yards.

Ther