I am not quoting newspaper condemnation. The newspapers have not always been found on that side of the line. I am not quoting from my own writings, these many years, on this subject. The paragraph is from the official report of the Tenement House Commission of 1900, of which I was not a member; nor is it alone in its condemnation. “They,” said the Tenement House Committee of 1894, speaking of the tenements, “interfere with the separateness and sacredness of the home, and ... conduce to the corruption of the young.” There you have it in a nutshell. They destroy the home and corrupt youth! But think of it! “All the conditions make for unrighteousness”—in a city of soon four million souls, half of whom come under that ban! And all the cities in the land copying after and tending the same way,—with yours, thank God! bringing up the rear. Keep Philadelphia there, brethren, as you value your civic life. With the tenement added to the rest you will never work out from under it. Keep it out, under whatever name it comes, whether as a French flat, an apartment house, or what not. It all means the destruction of the home ideal. Flats are but showy tenements. There is not one of them with a chimney big enough to let in Santa Claus, and you might as well give up at once as to have him excluded. There are few enough of them that, were the watchful eye of the sanitary policeman taken off them for six months, would not turn out as bad as the worst. And he has got one eye on the district leader now. Keep out the tenement; it is the enemy of the commonwealth. And ever hold in high honor the men who fight that fight for you, whether they be Jewish rabbis, Christian ministers, or lay brethren laboring for the good of their kind. They fight for your very life. I shall have much to say about these tenements hereafter. I will try to show in pictures that will help you to the understanding of it, how they injure the social fabric. Here I wish to remind you that that injury is yours as well as ours. An injury to one _is_ the concern of all in a democracy like ours. You cannot have citizenship tainted at one end of the line and expect to keep it untainted at the other end. It works mischief both ways. Ignorance hurts the state in the man who groans under it, and in the man who enslaved his mind, who permitted and was responsible for the outrage. It is of no use to shut our eyes to it. The slum is a cancer that has long roots reaching the avenue as well as the alley. The consciousness, however vague, of having betrayed his brother, breeds hardness of heart in the betrayer, for which alms-giving does not atone. “Forgiveness to the injured doth belong, He never forgives who did the wrong.”