Only the real inmates, and not the casual visitors, can know the "Helping Hand" for what it is in practice. Morally, it is a breeder of crime, and not an aid in any way to the recovery of self-respect. The only commendable feature about it is the Labor Bureau run in connection,--an adjunct that every Municipal Emergency Home should have. Such a Bureau is proof that the cry of men not wanting to work is a false cry. I wish those who pay heed to it could have seen the object lesson that morning when those hundreds of middle aged men, young men and boys, almost tumbled over one another in their eagerness to reach the window and get the jobs of carpet-sweeping, dish-washing, store-clerking, stenography, and other kinds of work that were being given out. Can such a rich city as Kansas City afford with impunity to neglect its duty to its "hewers of wood and drawers of water?" CHAPTER IX THE NEW ENGLAND "CONSCIENCE" "_See to it only that thyself is here,-- and art and nature, hope and dread, friends, angels and the Supreme Being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest._"--EMERSON. Studying in Boston--as is said of Paris--is being born in Boston. When a boy in my teens I spent four years there, and those four years awakened in me the brightest dreams and brightest hopes for a successful future. After thirty years, I am again in this renowned center of intellectual culture as a student, but this time as a social student in pursuit of knowledge of how our "Modern Athens" cares for the honest, out-of-work, penniless, homeless worker. At half-past ten at night, in search of a free bed, I made my way down to a building, at least seventy or more years old, looking for Boston's Municipal Lodging House, "The Wayfarers Lodge," better known as "The Hawkins Street Woodyard." (Boston is rather given to pretty names. They have a Deer Island also.) My reception was not at all encouraging for a destitute man. I was not even asked if I was hungry, but was shown at once into a bath-room, located down in the cellar, which was dark and uninviting. After my bath I put on a nightshirt taken from a basket, and carrying my hat, shoes, and stockings in my hand, I climbed two flights of stairs to the dormitories, leaving the rest of my clothes to be fumigated, as I supposed, but I doubt very much if that was done, as they had none of the purified odor of thoroughly disinfected clothing I had noticed in New York.