On Manhattan Island is, indeed, the Mother-Church, however unconsciously organized, of the black faith, and though, of necessity, there spontaneously arise elsewhere congregations that reach back to her, here is founded and established the Congregation of the Propaganda that reaches out to them. Its missionaries--its women, men, and methods--have stretched to Nome and the Canal Zone; they are preaching their own brand of dogma against the native versions of Buenos Ayres and Sydney, of Shanghai and Cape Town; and within its home city the hierarchy is entrenched by financial strength, political power, and legal negligence. As an industry, it has its wholesalers and retailers; or, as a church, its bishops sit in their national house of peers, while its younger orders, its proselyting priests and evangelizing deacons, perform their especial tasks, the young appealing to the young, the poor preying upon poverty. The entrance to these lower orders lies, as in most orders and most businesses, through a period of probation: the lad of sixteen plays the rôle of watchdog and spy for his superiors, for which he earns an occasional fifty-cent piece, or a casual kettle of beer, vastly increasing his income if he now and then diverts, as he generally does, his energies to the occupation of amateur theft. From this stage he is admitted, by his own efforts, to the possession of one girl, whom he bullies into working for him along the streets. He may occasionally deign to appear as a waiter in a café, and offer his woman to its drunken habitués; but most frequently he scorns all menial labor, for which, in fact, conditions have utterly unfitted him. Sometimes he increases his slave-holdings to a trio of women, and even farms out his victims to friends in his own or other neighborhoods or towns: more often he delivers his human wares to the proprietors of houses intended for their reception, being paid in a lump sum, or on a royalty basis; but in either case his ambition is, naturally, to rise to the position of the large property-holder or the political receiver of tribute. If he is an Italian, common consent limits his operations to the southern end of the Bowery; if he is a Jew, his field lies about the Houston and Essex Streets districts; whatever his European parentage, he seeks his fellow-countrywomen, and if he is American born he has the freedom of Broadway.