If anything is wanting to darken the picture of life in city slums, it is a sense of the needlessness of much of the suffering. And this is the sense which I cannot escape in looking back upon a winter in Chicago, from the vantage point of nearly a year of walking and working through regions west of that city. I left Chicago in May of 1892, and entered San Francisco in February of the following year, having gone on foot, in the meantime, through Illinois and southern Minnesota and western Iowa, and almost from end to end of Nebraska and Colorado and through some of New Mexico and much of Arizona and California. It was not in the character of a tramp, but as a wage-earner, that I made the journey; and the only notable fact about it was that I not only never lacked for labor, but I almost never had to ask for it, having scores of opportunities of work pressed upon me by employers hard up for hands. I am well aware of the abnormal in my experiment and of its little worth apart from the value of experience to myself, and I know how slight a connection with the deeper causes which give rise to congestion in labor centres the fact of ready employment in the country may have. Yet, as one result of personal contact, I cannot help seeing much of the misery of the mass in the light of individuals suffering wretchedly for want of knowledge of a better chance. We speak in old-fashioned phrase of a city’s slums as though they were a local evil in the town, quite remote in connection with the rest of the corporate whole, while in truth we know, in our haunting, new-found knowledge of social solidarity, that they form a sore which denotes disease in every part of the body politic. The conviction grows upon us that it is often at the cost of much suffering to our kind that we have food to eat and raiment to put on, and the immunity from personal responsibility which once we felt in paying high prices for our wares is fast being undermined by increased acquaintance with the ramifications of the “sweating system.” Indeed, we seem to see that, from the very frame of things, if one enjoys, another suffers, and that the unwitting oppressors of the poor are often the poor themselves, while the destruction of the poor is their poverty. Men tell us that things were growing worse, and that hope lies that way, because it points to ultimate dissolution and a new order. I find it impossible to share this form of optimism, and I cannot see that things are really getting worse, but rather incomparably better as measured, for example, by the standard of the last century of industrial progress. And so far from seeing hope in a belief that matters are getting worse, I find it rather in the view that much that is worst in modern life is fast becoming intolerable in a society which grows increasingly conscious of vital interdependence and relationship. Meanwhile the concrete facts remain, and here is a glimpse