Some Chicago millionaires once set afoot a giant scheme for settling the slum population of our great cities on farms. This was a project foredoomed to failure: one might as well attempt to colonize on the hills the fishes of the sea. The experiment of taking the slumfolk from the slums and making them agriculturists has been tried again and again, always with the best intention, always with the worst result: in a few years all are back again in the congenial slums. Of course it ought not to be that way; these unfortunate persons ought not to have inherited from countless generations of urban ancestors the tastes, feelings and capacities binding them to their mode of life as strongly as the children of prosperity are bound to theirs. The mysterious suasion of their environment ought not to exert its incessant, irresistible pull. The call of the slum should sound through their very dreams with a less iron authority. If with our superior wisdom we had made this world—you and I—men and women of all degrees would turn their faces ever to the light, and the line of least resistance would lead always upward. Their tastes and their instincts would never war with their interests, and the longer one had remained in bondage to the taskmasters of Egypt the more eagerly one would seek the Promised Land, the more contentedly dwell in it. In the world as we have it matters are differently ordered. The way to help the slumfolk is to improve the slums; not enough to drive them out—there should be no worse places for them to go to; just enough to give them a not altogether intolerable prosperity where they are. Earth has no more hopeless being than a renovated slum-dweller, uncongenially prosperous and inappropriately clean. II That there is in this country a deep-seated and growing distrust of the rich by the poor is a truth which every right-headed and right-hearted man is compelled to perceive and deplore. That many of the rich have thoughtlessly and selfishly done much to provoke it is equally obvious and equally deplorable; but largely, I think, it is due to the pernicious teachings of those of both classes who find a profit in promoting it. For neither the rich nor the poor constitute a brotherhood bound by the ties of a common interest; and on the whole, it is well that they do not, for loyalty in defense is usually associated with loyalty in aggression, and those accustomed to stand together for their rights too frequently think that the best foothold is found upon the rights of those opposing them. Not all the rich are men of prey, but to those who are, no quarry is more alluring than the other rich, not only in the way of direct spoliation in business, but by catching the pennies of the applauding poor through that kind of apostasy that poses as superior virtue.