“I have asked you here this evening,” she said, “that I may get the benefit of your united wisdom and experience. I seek enlightenment as to the best way to solve the problem of the housing of the poor in a great city. I wish to do something to make the conditions of existence a little more bearable for some of the wretched creatures that I have been seeing of late in such places as the Mulberry Street Bend, on Hester, Forsyth, and Cherry streets, and a hundred other places. “For some years, in connection with the Associated Charity work of Boston, I have visited poor families in the alleys of North Street, and have made myself somewhat familiar with the problems that are besetting us in the herding together of enormous numbers of people under conditions that, I think I am safe in saying, never before existed. What little I have seen in other cities is as nothing to what I find here. And it is here in New York, where I am told you have the most thickly populated square mile on the globe, and where the dregs from Castle Garden remain, that I propose to do something. “As I have been about with your district visitors and have picked my way among the garbage barrels and swarming mass of humanity in the Jewish quarter, on their market day, I have wondered how it was possible for morality to exist in the close personal contact and absolute want of privacy which this lack of space necessitates. Now, tell me, what is to be done to relieve this condition of things and permit those little _gamins_ to grow up decent American citizens? Are things worse or are they better than they used to be? I hear that a mint of money is spent in charity, but I hear also that in the past one of the greatest causes of pauperism has been found to be unwise philanthropy, and the more I look into the question the more perplexed and uncertain I find myself. “What does your experience suggest?” asked Mildred, turning with one of her winning smiles to a cheery-faced lady of perhaps fifty years of age, who sat at her right. “That is a pretty hard question to answer,” was the reply. “I’ve been at work for twenty-five years down on the East side near the river, and I am free to say that I don’t see much improvement. Of course, things are better in some ways; there is better sanitary inspection than there used to be, and need enough there is of it too, with these filthy Italians and Polish Jews who are pouring in here every week by the thousands. I must say I haven’t much hope of them.” “Yes, of course; but haven’t you hope of the children?” inquired Mildred, eagerly.