Suppose again that the scene of our illustration were advanced five years from the time of the Columbian Celebration to the time following the Dewey, Hobson and Santiago incidents of the war for the liberation of suffering Cuba, when patriotic sympathy for Spain's abused colonists, as described in a former chapter, was at the zenith of its flight. Would it not call for a cry of protest from the humanitarians? Would it not touch a chord of pity that would create a wave of compassion, covering the civilized world, for the hopelessly condemned innocents of Chicago, and, by its horror, compel the formation of an army of relief recruited from every civilized land? Would not this contrast put to shame the American goddess of charity for her far-away search for a mission while countenancing such hideous cruelty and neglect at home? Would not the hearts of men hang heavy with the responsibility of neglect until no more wards of society should be condemned by the chance of birth to be littered and kenneled in conditions of degraded animalism teeming with filth, sensuality and crime? * * * * * There will be ready reply to our illustration and simila. "It is an exaggerated supposition." "Such indifference and inhumanity could not be." "Civilization has passed beyond such a possibility." "Poverty and even neglect there may be, but nothing inhuman like that." * * * * * But in the face of all assertions to the contrary, worse neglect and cruelty than those given in the illustration _do exist_ in all the large cities of England and the United States, which are within the field of our personal observation, unnoticed, because they are commonplace, unchampioned because they are too near home. * * * * * Fortunately, indeed, this seeming indifference is not evidence of hopeless moral turpitude in the nation or in the race, as would seem to be the cowardice and selfishness displayed at the Charity Bazaar fire in Paris, or the beastly inhumanity and unchivalry let loose among the animals who beat back women and children from chances of escape on board the ill-fated _La Bourgogne_, but it arises from false conceptions of the responsibilities of individuals toward the correction of unwholesome civic conditions, and from the false and pernicious assumption that there must always and everywhere be a certain amount of unredeemable depravity in every generation and in every community. In England there is in vogue an expression, attributed, we believe, to the founder of the Salvation Army, to the effect that there must always be a class of criminals, wantons and loafers in every community, and which has been classified as "The hopelessly submerged ten per cent. stratum of society." We repeat this statement because of the enormity of the evil that lurks in the assumption of the condemnation.