But it is easy to find fault, and on that tack we get no farther. Those men did a great work, and they did it well. They built from the bottom and they built the foundation broad and strong. Good schools, better homes, and a chance for the boy are good bricks to build with in such a structure as we are rearing. They last. Just now we are laying another course; more than one, I hope. But even if it were different, we need not despair. Let the enemy come back once more, it will not be to stay. It may be that, like Moses and his followers, we of the present day shall see the promised land only from afar and with the eye of faith, because of our sins; that to a younger and sturdier to-morrow it shall be given to blaze the path of civic righteousness that was our dream. I like to think that it is so, and that that is the meaning of the coming of men like Roosevelt and Waring at this time with their simple appeal to the reason of honest men. Unless I greatly err in reading the signs of the times, it is indeed so, and the day of the boss and of the slum is drawing to an end. Our faith has felt the new impulse; rather, I should say, it has given it. The social movements, and that which we call politics, are but a reflection of what the people honestly believe, a chart of their aims and aspirations. Charity in our day no longer means alms, but justice. The social settlements are substituting vital touch for the machine charity that reaped a crop of hate and beggary. Charity organization--"conscience born of love" some one has well called it--is substituting its methods in high and low places for the senseless old ways. Its champions are oftener found standing with organized labor for legislation to correct the people's wrongs, and when the two stand together nothing can resist them. Through its teaching we are learning that our responsibility as citizens for a law does not cease with its enactment, but rather begins there. We are growing, in other words, to the stature of real citizenship. We are emerging from the kind of barbarism that dragged children to the jail and thrust them in among hardened criminals there, and that sat by helpless and saw the foundlings die in the infant hospital at the rate--really there was no rate; they practically all died, every one that was not immediately removed to a home and a mother. For four years now a joint committee of the State Charities' Aid Association and the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor has taken them off the city's hands and adopted them out, and in every hundred now eighty-nine live and grow up! After all, not even a Jersey cow can take the place of a mother with a baby. And we are building a children's court that shall put an end to the other outrage, for boys taken there are let off on probation, to give them the chance under a different teaching from the slum's, which it denied them till now.