The wildest imagination cannot possibly exceed some actual facts of tenement-house life. The story has been told again and again, until there is no novelty in it, of families crowded together so closely that all the decencies of life were forgotten, because it was impossible to observe them, of bad associations formed, of children wilting and weakening unto death because the air they breathed was unfit to support life, of food purchased at cheaper and cheaper prices until that finally used was little better than poison to those who ate it, of poverty induced by payments deferred, of the wretchedness and semi-starvation that exist through some of the long strikes of some of the laboring classes; but none of it fully equals the truth. There are happy, virtuous, well-fed, well-clothed families in tenement houses, and it is probably fair to say that these are perhaps in the majority, but the minority is so numerous that the heart is appalled at contemplating it. Out of their wretched homes these people cannot go. There is no other place for them. While a man and his wife are young and before they have children, they may roam about if they choose as tramps in pleasant summer weather, until some happy chance finds work for one or the other in the rural districts. But once anchored in the city by a family of children, and the opportunities of the laboring man of small income to ever change his condition are almost nothing. Some men say that the influence of religion is declining. The strongest refutation, and an absolute one, of this statement is that the miserable people in large cities do not arise in frenzied mobs and destroy everything which they cannot steal. The long, patient and then despairing struggle against the inevitable is enough to reduce any man to frenzy, were it not, as Longfellow says, that poverty “Crushes into dumb despair One-half the human race.” It nevertheless is true that as large a proportion of these people as of any other class in the city are religious by instinct, training and practice. The churches which they attend are more crowded on Sundays than those of the better classes, and the painter who wishes to find models of patience and resignation and determination can find them better at the doors of these churches than anywhere else in the world.