The people of this whole region are the victims of political corruption. Some of them have more fear of offending a political light, let his glimmer be ever so small, than of offending against even God's law. They could be turned out of house and home, deprived of the means of earning a living, by men who openly defy the law, and who become heroes to the growing boys and girls for no reason but because of their power to use and defy the law. The moral natures of the men and the women who grow up under this influence are dwarfed and warped until it is impossible for them to have distinct conceptions of right and wrong. The education they receive does not reveal the relations of ethics to life; the struggle for existence dulls the mind; while the depleted physical conditions caused by bad air, mal-nutrition and ignorance of real values reduce moral resistance almost to zero. Enforce the tenement-house laws, and the moral strength of the people of New York will rise to higher levels of moral resistance. Not poverty, but the burden imposed by political corruption, is the blight of home life in the tenement-house sections of New York. CHAPTER IV. SLOW-DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS. In a preceding chapter an attempt was made to show how hopeless the task of home-making was for women who had neither knowledge nor ideals to guide them. When it is remembered that the environment of these homes was in itself degrading, to maintain even the semblance of a home was a remarkable achievement. These women knew but three educating influences--home, school and Church. Four, perhaps, if one chooses to count the streets, where most of their time was spent, as one. The value of the first they revealed in the homes they made. The school at the time it was a factor in their development was a place that had no connection with anything else in their lives. What they learned there was but to the exceptional few without any practical value. They learned to read to get promoted, or because they could not help it. The arithmetic which they found valuable they learned in doing errands and spending their own pennies. They learned to form letters with their pens; but as they had no use for the knowledge, they soon forgot it. Their conception of education and that of their world left them perfectly at ease in their accomplishment. The Church had to do with their souls; and to the majority the care of their souls was a delegated responsibility, and gave them little concern, if any. Personal effort in that direction was a matter of old age. The Church was, by its own traditions and sentiment, a spiritual light and guide; the end and aim of its service to develop spiritual life by teaching and prayer. The social life of the people, or, for that matter, the civic conditions that to the last degree regulated and controlled their pleasures, were not the concern of the Church. The parish house did not exist. The institutional church had not been conceived even in thought.