There are not less than six missions, with twice that number of churches, in this one section; but so far as the environment of the poor is concerned, they might as well not exist. The majority of the tax-payers, those who command public respect and confidence, will not serve authoritatively in the political unit in which are their homes, in which their children must grow up. They will not take offices that would put it in their power to change the environment of the homes of the poor by securing the rights, enforcing the laws, that would protect all of the homes from the evils of vice, ignorance and unsanitary conditions. But these men when wealthy will support liberally institutions made necessary by their civic indifference. No man in a pulpit in the section has ever made a study of it to arouse the conscience and energies of the members of his church to their political duties. Unfortunately the women, for the most part, are as ignorant of the condition, and as indifferent. Because of the unsanitary conditions of the houses occupied by the poor, the dirty streets, the restrictions of child life, the lack of opportunity for moral development, the total dearth of recreative opportunity for the boys and girls, the young men and women who are wage-earners, the lack of educational facilities for the children who must be educated, if at all, at the expense of the State, the section is a prolific source of supply to the institutions the intelligent, sympathetic, wealthy women of the section are so active in creating and sustaining. The indifference of the wealthy and responsible to the conditions prevailing in parts of this section is so well known that officers at the heads of the city department ignore complaints, or treat them as incidents to be tolerated as part of the experiences of their official life. The penalty is being paid in the steady decline of real estate values, the gradual spread of the undesirable part of the community, the exodus of the wealthiest to the sections more remote from the tenements. The environment that has a degenerating influence on the people of limited means in that section is not due primarily to the political corruption of those using their positions to secure their own ends, but to the criminal attitude of the men in the churches and intelligent men not in them, who refuse to assume the political responsibilities that are their birthrights; the criminal indifference of those who fail to know the necessities of which the homes of the poor whom God gave into their charge stand in need. This section of the city is typical, not peculiar. Every section of New York gives evidence of the divorce between the churches and the political control that makes the environment of the home and the churches.