The census of Boston's tenements, made by the State Labor Bureau two years ago, is a masterly report, in full and digested shape, of the evils, their location, nature, and extent; but after the report appeared Boston behaved like Micawber, and thanked God that thing was done. New York has just issued a report by the Tenement House Committee of the State, of intense interest.

Time fails to multiply the unsolved problems of charity. Numerous, momentous, prolific, they challenge the soul of our country Here are tasks and careers worthy of our best men and women in utter devotion.

and age.

Charity is

But charity is guilty of worse things than ignorance. doing many things wrong. Dr. Walker said that while in morals the obvious was usually true, in economics the obvious was usually false. Charity, in relieving distress, often creates more than it relieves. Charity means to be kind and gives, but proves to be cruel when it tempts weak men from work to beggary. Charity opens a five-cent night shelter in Boston, which gathers a multitude of loafers whom it trains to a degraded life of idleness, though just round the corner stands the Municipal Wayfarers' Lodge, with open doors, cleaner beds, better food, and a bath. But the stent of two hours of sawing wood repels, while cheaper life attracts and degrades.

Does not the treatment of criminals and paupers in institutions often deserve the same indictment of being done wrong? How large and vicious a class we find vibrating between jails, houses of correction, almshouses, and hospitals. All that many officers care for is a low per capita cost. How to reduce the evil is beyond their ken or thought. How the community should grapple with the evil at its sources and cut off the supply does not awaken sufficient public interest to rescue these institutions from the care of inferior men or party politics. Prison systems create too many criminals, while they offer small chance for a return to virtuous life when the doors

open.

I wonder if New Haven has not the best system in the United States for aiding discharged prisoners to regain an honest career in life. Professor Francis Wayland came to Boston from here ten years ago to tell us of your admirable and successful system, but thus fa not much progress has been achieved in Boston in following you Mistaken treatment in these and other ways is guilty of fo

lead.

tering a rapidly increasing class of degraded criminals, often the progeny of criminal or diseased or feeble-minded parents.

Leaders in charity are alive to these evils, and cry out against them. But not yet can they gain public support for needed reforms. The college settlements are doing glorious work. Hull House attacks the evils of a congested district in Chicago with maps and data, on a like plan to that stupendous work of Charles Booth on the East End of London. Who does not feel the vital relation of all these problems of what charity can do, or cannot yet do, or is doing wrong, to the welfare and best progress of the world? What is to be the final outcome, good or evil? Which shall prevail, Utopia or the slum?

Let me urge on members of this Conference that all these varieties of work in cities should rest on thorough knowledge, and be easily promoted and wisely guided by working libraries of the best sociologic literature.

Boston has for a few years past been purposing to organize such a library in some central site, free for study to all who wish, perhaps also a bureau for lectures and conferences and concentrated interest, influence, and co-operation. Ought not every great public library to set apart ample facilities for sociologic study, with the best and newest literature gathered into convenient alcoves, easy of access and always open?

Ought not somewhere in the United States a central bureau to be established to gather, digest, edit, and, if need be, translate, valuable publications, and on some simple, judicious scheme disseminate selected portions widely through the cities which are eager for sound data, but lack facilities as yet where workers in charity can learn the results of the action, experiment, or thought of other cities or writers ?

I am ashamed of the condition of Boston in this regard. The time has come to put our sociological work and study on a worthier and more thorough basis of scientific knowledge.

A bibliography of current literature I wish might be yearly published in our volume as a guide and aid to study by us all. What a rich and useful mass of literature our friends are issuing on the subjects which this Conference of Charities and Correction meets to discuss!

Come now, and let us measure the full significance of all these

facts I have passed in review, and which have developed so marvellously the last score of years.

This outburst of charitable energy and thought, invasion of colleges by social problems, absorption in them of a large staff of able teachers, keen interest in them by our noblest youth of both sexes, growing interest of the public, awakening of the public conscience, the search light of literature turned on to the shady side of life, the prominence of these questions in legislation, the red heat of labor leaders, their wrath at ineffectual charity, the recognized relation of the wage problem to social progress and virtue, the rising tide of indignation at the failure of prison discipline, alarm at the gathering masses of degraded criminal pauper life, intense interest in the stupendous problem of unemployment aggravated by the commingling of genuine searchers for work with idle loafers at cheap shelters, trained tramps and feeble-minded offspring of wretched parentage, the rising wrath of the people at the foul and cruel conditions of slum life increased by the belief that the degraded population living and growing up in such unfit homes not merely adds to the cost of all our institutions, but depresses the whole rate of wages by the competition of wretched and poorly paid labor,- these are tremendous problems. Mark well the intense interest in them more widely felt each year. Will not future history, looking back over the ages, declare that in these last decades of the nineteenth century occurred a revolution not wholly unlike, and even surpassing in its benignant influence on the welfare of man, the great revolutions of the seventeenth century in England or the American and French revolutions of a century ago? England shook herself free from the rule of royal despots. America asserted to the world the inherent right of popular independence. France broke in blood the shackles of popular servitude.

The revolution of which our century is not yet conscious means not so much that labor shall be free and workmen honored as that noblesse oblige,- that the rich, the happy, the cultured, are put under a conscious moral servitude to every form of distress, only to be likened reverently to that which obliged the Creator of the world to send His Son to minister to man. Is it too bold a paradox to say that, while the revolutions of 1688, 17

liberated man, gain en

The glory of life,- whence comes it,- if not out of what is intensely loved, sought for, fought for, if need be, died for?

Our Revolution gave us immortal patriots. Slavery fired the lips. of Whittier with impassioned verse, goaded John Brown to die with words not unlike those of Socrates, and inspired Lincoln to speak the divinest words ever uttered on this continent. Is the age of poetry dead? Have pulpits lost their power? Is there nothing that men care for supremely? Has our age lost that Promethean fire of intensity, source of exalted thought, inspired speech, heroic life? Who dares to enter a university city, and talk such folly? Not I, for one. Yet I will not deceive myself, nor you, nor ingenuous youth. The danger is terrible, not so much to the world as to the upper classes, to educated men.

Nil admirari is death, moral, spiritual, potential, death. For college men it is abdication. If they halt or stammer or play, other men in dead earnest will take the lead, and win the game, and wear the laurel. The most powerful speech in recent years in old Faneuil Hall in Boston came from the lips of John Burns, the great labor leader of London, a few months ago. The uplift of workingmen in England, their deep interest in honest municipal government and in labor reforms, these subjects made Burns an apostle of power as he spoke, red-hot with fervid devotion to a great cause.

Not in jealousy, but in noble emulation, Yale and Harvard and Columbia, and all the rest, must send their men into the contest for the leadership of the world, not merely with broad and solid foundation of knowledge, not merely with thorough special training in sociologic problems, but, more than all else, with a fiery enthusiasm of human sympathy. Never more than to-day did the world cry out for great leaders, whence shall they come ? From the ranks of the people, or from schools and colleges? From the bench of hard toil or the desk of study?

God grant that both may unite in cordial cowork, in hearty mutual respect, in noble rivalry, that union may bring strength equal to the tremendous tasks, which are almost infinite, when men are conscious of the duties growing out of the brotherhood of man.

"And when he was come into his own country, he taught them in their gogue, insomuch that they were astonished, and said, Whence hath this ma wisdom, and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter's son? Is n mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and J And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all things? And they were offended in him. But Jesus said unto them, A pr is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house. And t not many mighty works there because of their unbelief."- MATT. xiii. 54-58.

There is a touch of naturalness in these words that puts 1 authenticity beyond all doubt. It does more than authenticate record: it uncovers human nature. Jesus had been brought u Nazareth, was the son of a carpenter there, had played as a chil its streets, was one of a family of children, had worked at his tr and at last had left the place, gone down into the region of Jordan, and received baptism at the hands of John. After a time returns in an entirely new character,-a remarkable speaker in synagogue and a healer of diseases. The people were astonish "Whence this wisdom and these mighty works?" They do wonder at the wisdom or the works, but at the source of the They detected the wisdom, they appreciated the works; but much they-Hebrew-like-delighted in wise words on religion, and mu as they-like all men-were amazed by miracles, they threw bo aside, and turned their wonder on the man. But the wonder was t much for them. They stumbled over it into incredulity, forgot t wisdom, explained away the miracles, and lost the good of bot Had some gray-hea

to

ho

P

ta