In the Antelope State, on the Big Muddy River, on a plateau rising from the west bank of the river is built the city of Omaha, the metropolis of the State, with a population of 150,000 people. Omaha was called the "Gate City" on account of its important commercial position when it was founded in 1854. It was one of the first to breathe of the mighty progress of civilization in our great West; and, like all of our growing Western cities, is eminently an industrial center--meat packing, breweries, smelters, machine shops, brick yards,--and it is an important railway center. Because of all of this, it continually beckons through its portals a vast number of the army of the seekers after work. Omaha, too, boasts of its culture and humanity, and of a social distinction around which cluster names which in the years to come will be intimately connected with the history of the country. I reached Omaha on a Sunday morning in September. What a gloomy day for the penniless toiler this God's day is, in the great city, when unwashed, unfed, and homeless, he walks the streets! All places for obtaining work are closed and he can simply drift until Monday morning, when industrial activity is resumed. I found the city of Omaha spending thousands of dollars for the entertainment and amusement of visitors to the annual convention of a great fraternal organization. While its stores and blocks and public buildings had been placed on dress parade with gaudy decorations, and while the glad hand of hospitality was stretched out to these guests from thousands of its citizens, there was no welcome for the honest laborer who might happen to be homeless and penniless within its gates, and no provision for him but the filthy concrete floor of the huge steel cages, beneath the crumbling plastered walls of the city jail. I walked down the darker streets in the lower part of the city where the out-of-work are forced to gather. In Boston I thought I had never seen such a gathering of human misery as I found on Boston Common, but nowhere have I found that condition so evident in a smaller way than in Omaha. Approaching a policeman, I asked for the public baths. It was my first test to find out what our Western cities were doing to provide that great sanitary necessity. I was told there was "nothing doing," and the policeman glanced significantly towards the "Big Muddy." I do not know of a single public bath west of Chicago except in Denver.