“The public authorities and organized charities of Chicago are having more than they can do to care for the tens of thousands of destitute people in the Garden City, and the New York Tribune confesses that the want in that town is as dire as in Chicago. ‘At no moment within the memory of the present generation,’ says the Tribune, ‘has the number of unemployed in this city been so large as just now, and never before has the strain on public and private charity been so severe as during this winter season (1896–97). It is not merely the laboring classes—that is to say, the classes who may be regarded as within facile reach of philanthropic relief—who are the sufferers, but those who may be described as professional men, clerks, the salesmen, the architects and the literary men. Few, save the clergy and physicians, have any idea of the extent to which privation and actual want prevail among these victims of the bad times that are marking the close of the deplorable Democratic administration, and doctor and parson alike wax eloquent about the destitution of the families of those unfortunate men who, while eager for work and ready to do anything for the sake of a living, are for the first time in their lives unable to find employment of any kind.’ After adverting to the sympathy extended to the unfortunate inmates of Sing Sing and other prisons, who are losing their sanity because there is no work to employ them, the Tribune adds: ‘It may be questioned whether the first duty of the people of New York is not toward those of their more honest and honorable fellow-citizens whose enforced idleness, due to their inability to find any employment, is driving them, too, to the verge of insanity—an insanity caused not so much by the brooding over their own unhappy lot as by the spectacle of their wives and little ones literally starving before their eyes. It is not merely on the ground of philanthropy and charity that some means or other should be devised for their relief, but on the score of policy and economy. For the less enforced idleness there is outside the prison the fewer convicts there will be within its walls.’” The next clipping is as follows: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II.