You have no idea of the endless details I have had to consider. I have been over every single model tenement I could find in New York and Brooklyn, which is not saying much, for there are not many. Now, although not a stone is yet laid, I feel as if a load had rolled off my shoulders and the thing were nearly complete. I shall watch with the greatest anxiety the outcome of this experiment. If it can be shown, as I think it can, that the lowest poor can be comfortably housed at the prices which they now pay for their wretched slums, and if it can be demonstrated, as I think it can, that health and happiness increase and vice decreases in proportion to the opportunity which is offered for decent living, then I shall be ready to devote a goodly number of my millions to what seems to me about the best use that can be made of them. As soon as it can be fully proved just what needs to be done, if a state or city loan can be obtained, I mean to try to persuade some of these wealthy men and women whom I have been meeting of late to join with me and engage in the work of tenement house reform on a gigantic scale. There is no good reason why the crying evils which now exist should be perpetuated another year. Since planning all this I have been greatly interested to learn of what Glasgow has recently been doing in this direction; buying up and destroying a mass of vile old rookeries, and building sanitary homes for the poor in place of them. There is money enough, brains enough, and good will enough in this city to abolish these hideous conditions of life by which thousands of lives are wrecked every year. I am very doubtful about much state socialism; but municipal socialism to this extent seems to me the only rational thing in view of the present evils. A century hence we shall look back with wonder that our mania for individualism and dread of governmental interference should have led us to tolerate these things a day. I was never more convinced of anything than of this, and never more terribly in earnest about anything in my life. Meanwhile my agents are buying up and cleansing some of the worst old tenement houses in the city, and I am searching in every direction for the right person to put in charge of them. I find that this is the most important feature of it all. There must be constant, tireless supervision, and I find that it really pays to give one good tenant his rent free on condition that he keep the building clean and orderly. He must, of course, be one who has enough moral power to enforce all necessary rules. These details must sound very prosaic to you, I fear, in comparison with all the delightful things which you are studying; but just at present I am finding the subject of dumb-waiters and ash-shoots quite as fascinating as I ever used to find Correggios or cryptogamia.