The customary way of city people, in avoiding responsibility and deep thought on this subject, consists in saying that the people who live in this way are of low organizations any way, and that they can exist and flourish and grow fat amid surroundings which would kill any decent person. There is some truth in this so far as certain low organizations are concerned. Unfortunately, however, there is no race, sex, nationality or creed among the very poor in the large city. All of them are people who either were born very poor or who, having been reduced to poverty, are endeavoring to make the best of their lot. There are Americans of good name and good family now serving in the commoner mechanical capacities in the city of New York, and only a little while ago it was discovered that the wife of a gallant Major-General, who served the United States faithfully during the late unpleasantness, was “living out” as a domestic servant. It is not a result of poverty, misfortune, sickness or anything of the kind. All those horrors are the results, first of all, of city life, of living where no one knows his own neighbors and where the person who falls into embarrassments or is overwhelmed by misfortune has no one to whom to turn, and takes to anything at short notice and in utter desperation, to keep the wolf from the door. Cities should be suppressed, but that is impossible. They should be properly policed by persons competent to discover and report those most in need of assistance; but that also seems impossible. The only chance left seems to be that the larger the city the greater shall be the missionary work done in it by all denominations. When Jesus was alive and was anxious to secure the attention of the people, he did not bemoan their sad condition, but on one occasion, when some thousands of them followed him, he himself supplied them with food. The servant is not greater than the master, and religious people, regardless of differences of creed, can find no better work in large cities than to search out the needy and endeavor to lift their feet out of the mire and put them in a dry place, to quote from the inspired psalmist in one of his most eloquent passages. One good and pressing reason--though a selfish one--for closer and more sympathetic attention to the poor of large cities, is that the great mass of criminals come from the poorer classes, and that when criminals are once made it is hard to unmake them. The famous Inspector Byrne, of New York, the man most feared by wrongdoers everywhere, spends annually a great deal of his hard-earned money in trying to persuade criminals not to drop back into their old ways, but he believes that he only retards their return to crime--not that he effects any reformations. The following words from a man of his stern experience and sympathetic nature are terrible in their warning against neglect of the class from which most criminals spring: