Religion, which the majority of the men with whom I talked took to be synonymous with the word church, was another favourite topic of discussion. Indeed, as I look back now over my conversations with the "gay-cats," it seems to me that there was more said on this subject than any other, and I have observed its popularity as a topic of conversation among unemployed men in other countries as well. There is something about it which is very attractive to men who are vagrants, as they think, because of circumstances over which they had no control, and they sit and talk by the hour about what they think the church ought to do, and wherein it fails to accomplish that which it is supposed to have for a purpose. The men that I met think that the reason that the church in this country is not more successful in getting hold of people is because it neglects its duties to the poor. "Here you and I are," a young mechanic remarked to me, as we sat in the cold at a railroad watering-tank, "and what does any church in this town care about us? Ten chances to one that, excepting the Catholic priest, every clergyman we might go to for assistance would turn us down. Is that Christianity? Is that the way religion is going to make you and me any better? Not on your life. I tell you, the church has got to take more interest in me before I am going to go out of my way to take much interest in it." "But the church is not a public poor-house," I remonstrated. "You and I are no more excused than other people from earning our living. If the church had to take care of all the people who think they're poor, it would go bankrupt in a day." "It's bankrupt already, so far as having any influence over the men that you and I meet," he replied. "I don't see a man more than once in six months who goes near a church, and he's generally a Catholic. There's something wrong, you can bet, when things have got to that pass. If the church can't interest fellows like us, it's going to have its troubles interesting anybody." There were others who expressed themselves equally strongly, but I was unable to get any satisfactory suggestion from any of them as to how the church may be made either more religious or effective. They all had their notions concerning its defects and shortcomings, but they seemed unable to tell how these were to be supplanted by merits and virtues. Many of them impressed me as men who would be capable, under different conditions, of religious feeling, and there was something pathetic, I thought, in the way they loved to linger in conversation on the subject of religion, but in their present circumstances the most inspired church in the world could not do much with them. They are victims of the passion for indiscriminate criticism, and I doubt whether they would know whether a church was doing its duty or not.