an investigation conducted in Berlin established the fact that with families living in one room the death rate was one hundred and sixty-three per thousand, while with families living in three or four rooms it was twenty. What it was with three or four families living in one room does not appear. According to a recent report of the New York Tenement House Commission there were four hundred thousand “dark rooms”—rooms without any outside opening whatever. Mr. Riis has been so successful in battling with such conditions that he has been called by President Roosevelt “the most useful American.” Neither the President nor Mr. Riis understand economics, and so probably they are both perplexed at the result of his ten years of effort—which is that rents on the East Side have gone up about fifty per cent. in the last two years, and there have been riots and evictions—and a Socialist all but elected to Congress! But Mr. Riis is a business man, and he can figure the social cost of these evil conditions. Of the New York tenements he writes: “They are the hot beds of epidemics that carry death to the rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they taint the family life with deadly moral contagion.” In his newly published discussion of social problems called “In the Fire of the Heart,” Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine writes of the country’s situation as follows: “And over ten millions of our people are in a state of chronic poverty at this very hour—almost one out of every seven, or, to make full allowance, one out of every eight of all our people are in the condition where they have not sufficient food, and clothing, and shelter to keep them in a state of physical and mental efficiency. And the sad part of it is that large additional numbers—numbers most appalling for such a country as this, are each year, and through no fault of their own, dropping into this same condition.