Miss Stafford once asked me about religions, other than Catholic, met with in the tenements. During my four years in the underbrush I saw and came to know many persons, men and women, whom I would describe as “God-fearing.” They were loyal citizens and doing the best they could with their opportunities. None of them ever more than mentioned their church, none of them spoke to me of knowing or ever meeting their minister. One of these was the woman who loved much, the woman whom Polly Preston had the good fortune to meet and come to know. Though I lived in the same tenement with her, talked with her day after day, I never heard her mention the name of her minister, or in any way got the idea that she so much as dreamed of his ever calling to see her. I used to see the man who preached in the church that she attended—walking down Fifth Avenue exuding wealth and overeating. So far as I saw in the slums of New York City the Protestant minister of the Gospel is as extinct as the dodo. There are preachers, at least one for every Protestant church. Protestants living in the tenements sicken and die, but they never dream of receiving a call or so much as a word of inquiry from the well-fed individual under whose teachings they have sat of a Sunday. During my four years in the underbrush I never saw or heard of a Protestant minister in the slums of New York City, nor in a hospital. There never was a day that I did not meet at least one Catholic priest. During the influenza epidemic they were everywhere, at all times, day and night. They ministered to the sick, offered comfort to the living, and buried the dead. Many, many times while I was doing social work I had Catholic priests to go out of their way to assure me of their willingness to help, to tell me where I could locate them. They made no denominational distinction. Once when I was calling on a patient at the Presbyterian Hospital there chanced to be two priests in that ward of twelve beds. On their way out both stopped and spoke to me, and gave me their addresses. Several times I had occasion to call on the services of a priest. The response was always immediate. I never had occasion to call on a Protestant minister, for the Protestant who finds himself or herself in the slums of New York City soon learns that they must die as they have lived, unattended by a spiritual adviser. CHAPTER XXIV THE GALL OF THE YOKE “The public be damned!” snarled a successful capitalist some forty or more years ago, a capitalist who himself had been one of the public. For by the public he meant working people and all who are forced to travel with them. Other capitalists and near-capitalists, imagining that his expression was a formula in some way responsible for his ability to get money from the very class he cursed, adopted it as their business slogan.