They failed to appreciate their responsibility, those men of the highest character. They did not fail to collect the rents that sometimes went as high as forty per cent. upon the value of their property. No, but let us give them their due-an agent collected the rents, they did not. _They_ traveled abroad; perhaps they never saw the dens upon the proceeds of which they lived at their ease. Do you see what I am driving at? Do you see how it all, here as everywhere, is just a question of gold that will buy _ease_ for ourselves! For gold we sold the black man into slavery, and for gold we let his white brother perish in his slum. We were in a hurry to get rich and we forgot all else besides; forgot the brotherhood in our worship of the golden calf. Men have done it in all times, and the slum is as old as is organized society. “The destruction of the poor is their poverty.” Whatever else was the matter with those houses, they paid. I will tell you one thing that was the matter with that slum where the home had ceased to be sacred, where the family ideal was tortured to death and character smothered, where children were damned rather than born into the world until the very shock of the discovery that one in five was killed by the worst of the dens came almost as a relief. When the Church finally roused itself to the doing of its duty it put a long-belated finger upon the sore spot of it all: “In this ward,” said the Federation of Churches after a house-to-house canvass, “the churches, clubs, schools, educational and helpful agencies of every kind make a front of 756 running feet on the street, while the saloons, put side by side, stretch themselves over nearly a mile; so that ideals of citizenship are minting themselves upon the minds of the people at the rate of seven saloon thoughts to one educational thought.” The devil had it in that ward, seven to one. Out of such an environment comes the Lost Tenth, the helpless and the hopeless, that levy tribute on our strength and our life. Comptroller Coler showed that eleven and one-half per cent. of all the money raised by taxation in New York went to support poverty and, largely, pauperism, with the burden all the time increasing. The poverty maps at our Tenement House Exhibition showed few enough tenements that were free from the taint of alms-seeking, but some from which, in five years, seventy-five different families had asked public relief. That is one thing that is the matter with the slum—it makes its own heredity. The sum of the bad environment of to-day and of yesterday becomes the heredity of to-morrow, becomes the citizenship of to-morrow. The lowered vitality, the poor workmanship, the inefficiency, the loss of hope—they all enter in and make an endless chain upon which the curse of the slum is handed down through the generations. Our task is to break that chain, unless we want it to break us. We accepted the legacy in the charter of a people’s rights: life, liberty and the