Only a few weeks since, I called, with a brother minister, on a family of Maine people in a miserable tenement house in the North End. The husband and father had been sick and out of work for a good while. A short time before my visit, however, he had shipped on a coaster from Hyannis to Philadelphia. He had arranged for a little credit for his family to keep them from starving, until his expected return; but the winds had been contrary, and he was several days overdue. The wife and four children were in despair. They had had nothing since the morning of the day before, and then only bread and water, except a little broth which a neighbor, not much better off, brought in to one of the children--a beautiful little girl, sick with what would be "la grippe" on Beacon Hill, but is only "grip" down in the slums. The mother had a little babe, and was in such delicate health that it was impossible for her to go out to wash or scrub. Her two narrow little rooms were scrupulously neat and clean, as were her children; but the tears ran down her cheeks as, in answer to our questions, she confessed, as if she had been admitting a crime, poor soul, that they had had nothing to eat all day. I give you these instances to show you how false is the idea that poverty and enforced residence in a miserable tenement house are a badge of sin or wrong-doing. But think of the agony of fathers and mothers, who love their children as well as you love yours, and have ambitions for them as holy and pure, who are compelled to see their loved ones deteriorating under their eyes, and through the contamination of the poisonous moral atmosphere which they breathe, dropping slowly, but certainly, down to a level with the brutality which surrounds them. [Illustration: A CHEAP LODGING-HOUSE.] Well, you ask, what is the remedy for all this? My main purpose, in this series of discourses, was to place the facts of the situation before the people. But I have some plain, practical, common-sense suggestions to make. In the first place, we want an almost _infinitely_ better system of inspection of tenement houses. Every tenement house in the city, having as many as eight families in it, ought to be inspected carefully, at least once a month--and once a week would be better--by an officer who holds his place under civil-service rules, entirely independent of politics, and who is held to a strict responsibility for the performance of his duties.