It was a clear beautiful day. Blue sky and blue sea, all around, white ships sailing by, the men working in the fields, the women busy in the sewing rooms, all inspired me to think that Deer Island could be made a place of hope and cheer. But that vision was far from the reality. The prisoners kept a funeral silence, happiness or hope was not for them. Even their work was stolen from them. I said to one intelligent looking man who was working in the garden, "It helps a fellow to come down here, doesn't it?" He answered, "Yes, if we are not made physical wrecks by the treatment we receive, it does help us. But then, when our time is up, we are disgraced and thrown back helpless into the same old slums of the city, just as before." The Penal Commissioner of Boston told me that he could use thirty beds a night in a Municipal Emergency Home, just to accommodate the men and women who were daily discharged destitute from Deer Island. While Boston has done much for its poor, its sick, and its children, there still remains the problem of the utterly down and out, the shelterless and moneyless, but honest, workers. Can Boston allow New York to excel it in caring for it shelterless workers? I hear the cry, "Where can we get the money?" When you ask that question you are putting a price on a man's soul. I wish some goddess of gentleness would touch the hearts of those "munificent" and "public spirited" citizens who founded the Boston Public Library, that they might also build a Municipal Emergency Home, and ornament its frieze with a perpetual beauty of words, "Dedicated to the advancement of the Commonwealth and Humanity." I am not without historical sentiment. I love local antiquities, if they can be mine to enjoy without oppression. Boston has old burying grounds and churches worth millions and millions of dollars. The dead have rested there a long time. Why not build for the living who have nowhere to lay their heads, a Municipal Emergency Home that would be a living force for the upbuilding of the morals and economic security of the commonwealth? CHAPTER X PHILADELPHIA'S "BROTHERLY LOVE" "_Hast thou Virtue? Acquire also the graces and beauties of Virtue._" --FRANKLIN. I had read that Philadelphia's hospitality was her great virtue, and that it was characteristic of her people to bestow upon the stranger and the homeless--who are and who come within her gates--a blessing of care and kindness nowhere else known,--to make them feel that at last they have found a haven.