Many things seem to me to tend that way. The isolation of the farm is disappearing. The telephone; the free rural delivery of mails, which brings good roads, daily newspapers and the bicycle; the concentration of rural schools; a better grasp of the obstacles in the way of keeping the boy on the farm—these at one end. At the other, the harnessing of new forces capable of transmitting power away from the centres of steam energy, and the scattering of the congested populations to the suburbs; means of transportation that we knew not of a dozen years ago. It seems as if the very century, the stamp of which is combination, concentration, so far as we are yet able to make it out, might have in store for us as its big surprise the reversal of the process that characterized its predecessor and bred our perplexities: the drift of the population everywhere to the cities. So that when it seemed in extremest peril, the rescue of the home may be made easier than we thought. I would that in this I might be a true prophet! We can face the other problems of our day with confidence, if the _home_ be safe; for _there_ we have backing. And now let me take you to my own city, to the metropolis, as typical of most of the large cities of our country. We struggle with the same evils in Boston, in Chicago, in New York, in Buffalo, in St. Louis, in Washington. It was only the other day that I looked upon some alleys in the national capital, under the very shadow of the big gray dome, in which the crowding was as vile and as wicked as it ever was in the one-room houses of Glasgow. Though you boast of less crowding upon the land here in Philadelphia, yet we have the testimony of your public-spirited men and women that the sanitary condition of your alleys is far from good. That means darkness and dirt. In other words, you are no stranger to the pigsty of which I spoke as being the enemy of the home and of American citizenship. How came it about? What brought us to the brink, where, looking over, we see “all the conditions” under which the people live “making for unrighteousness”? I said it before; but let the public records speak. In 1865, the Council of Hygiene, pointing to the tenement slum, said, “Its evils and the perils that surround it are the necessary result of a forgetfulness of the poor.” “Evils,” was putting it mildly. They came in the last analysis to murder, child murder. The undertaker and the slum landlord divided the profits between them. “Not intemperance, ignorance or destitution alone causes the increase of crime,” was the report of a committee come down from Albany in the fifties to see what was the matter with New York; “together they, with municipal and popular neglect, find their soil in the tenements and thrive and develop virulence.” The remedy, as the committee saw it, was to “_furnish every man with a clean and comfortable home_.”