XXIII THE SOCIAL QUAGMIRE 413 



In the pages of The Arena, within the last two years, I 

 find the following statements : — 



" In the city of New York there are over one hundred and fifty 

 thousand people who earn less than sixty cents a day. Thousands 

 of this number are poor girls who work from eleven to sixteen hours 

 a day. Last year there were over twenty-three thousand families 

 forcibly evicted in that city owing to their inability to pay their 

 rent." {Arena^ February, 1891, jd. 375.) 



"During the ten years which ended in 1889, the great metropolis 

 of the western continent added to the assessed value of its taxable 

 property almost half a billion dollars. In all other essential respects 

 save one, the decade was a period of retrogression for New York 

 City. Crime, pauperism, insanity, and suicide increased ; repres- 

 sion by brute force personified in an armed police was fostered, 

 while the education of the children of the masses ebbed lower and 

 lower. The standing army of the homeless swelled to twelve 

 thousand nightly lodgers in a single precinct, and forty thousand 

 children AVer e forced to toil for scanty bread." {Areiia^ August, 

 1891, p. 365.) 



"When the compulsory education law went into eflect (in 

 Chicago), the inspectors found in the squalid region a great number 

 of children so destitute that they Avere absolutely unfit to attend 

 school on account of their far more than semi-nude condition ; and 

 although a number of noble-hearted ladies banded together and 

 decently clothed three hundred of these almost naked boys and 

 girls, they were compelled to admit the humiliating fact that they 

 had only reached the outskirts, while the great mass of poverty had 

 not been touched. . . On one night last February, one hundred and 

 tAventy four destitute men begged for shelter at the cells of one of 

 the city police stations." ( Arena, November, 1891, p. 761.) 



' ' Within cannon shot of Beacon Hill, Avhere proudly rises the 

 golden dome of the Capitol, are hundreds of families sloAvly 

 starving and stifling ; families Avho are bravely battling for life's 

 barest necessities, Avhile year by year the conditions are becoming 

 more hopeless, the struggle for bread fiercer, the outlook more 

 dismal." ( Arena, March, 1892, p. 524.) 



The above extracts may serve to give an imperfect 

 indication of the condition of those whose labour produces 

 much of America's phenomenal wealth. Volumes would 

 not suffice to picture a tithe of the misery, starvation, and 

 degradation that pervades alf the great cities, and to a 

 less extent the smaller manufacturing towns and rural 

 districts ; and one of the latest writers on the subject gives 

 it as his conclusion, 



" that there is in the heart of America's money-centre a jjoverty 



