I should be sorry if anything I have said seemed to cast slight upon the organized efforts at relieving want, especially such as unite inquiry into the facts and the provision of work with the relief of want. All that I contend for is the right--or call it the privilege--of giving to him that asketh, even when you do not know that he needs, or deserves to need. Both here and in Boston I have lent myself--sparingly and grudgingly, I’ll own--to those organized efforts; and I know how sincere and generous they are, how effective they often are, how ineffective. They used to let me go mostly to the Italian folk who applied for aid in Boston, because I could more or less meet them in their own language; but once they gave me a Russian to manage--I think because I was known to have a devotion for Tolstoy and for the other Russian novelists. The Russian in question was not a novelist, but a washer of bags in a sugar-refinery; and at the time I went to make my first call upon him he had been “laid off,” as the euphemism is, for two months; that is, he had been without work, and had been wholly dependent upon the allowance the charities made him. He had a wife and a complement of children--I do not know just how many; but they all seemed to live in one attic room in the North End. I acquainted myself fully with the case, and went about looking for work in his behalf. In this, I think, I found my only use: but it was use to me only, for the people of whom I asked work for him treated me with much the same ignominy as if I had been seeking it for myself; and it was well that I should learn just what the exasperated mind of a fellow-being is when he is asked for work, and has none to give. He regards the applicant as an oppressor, or at least an aggressor, and he is eager to get rid of him by bluntness, by coldness, even by rudeness. After the unavailing activity of a week or two, I myself began to resent the Russian’s desire for work, and I visited him at longer and longer intervals to find whether he had got anything to do; for he was looking after work, too. At last I let a month go by, and when I came he met me at the street door--or, say, alley door--of the tenement-house with a smiling face. He was always smiling, poor fellow, but now he smiled joyously. He had got a job--they always call it a job, and the Italians pronounce it a _giobbe_. His job was one which testified to the heterogeneous character of American civilization in even amusing measure. The Jews had come into a neighboring street so thickly that they had crowded every one else out; they had bought the Congregational meeting-house, which they were turning into a synagogue, and they had given this orthodox Russian the job of knocking the nails out of the old woodwork. His only complaint was that the Jews would not let him work on Saturday, and the Christians would not let him work on Sunday, and so he could earn but five dollars a week. He did not blame me for