Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VI. THE SAVAGES OF CIVILIZATION. This chapter was caused by a visit through the slums of New York City. Of course, no adequate idea of the horrible depths of degradation that exist there could be formed from observations made during one short trip through the slums. But being familiar with poverty in other cities, and having read such comprehensive and valuable works as Mr. J. A. Riis's " How the Other Half Lives," General Booth's "In Darkest England," etc., I feel fairly well qualified to say a few words on this important subject. When Prof. Huxley lived as a medical officer in the east of London he acquired a knowledge of the condition of the life of its denizens, which led him to say subsequently that the surroundings of the savages of New Guinea were much more conducive to the leading of a decent human existence than those in which many of the East Londoners live. The same is true of the New York slums and their inhabitants ; nay, it is substantially true of all the slums of all our large towns and cities. I have seen as abject poverty in Washington City, under the very shadow of the National Treasury, whose vaults were overflowing with a great "surplus," taken from the pockets of the poor and spent (squandered) on "public buildings" in various congressional districts, which helped to re-elect boodled politicians to seats which they disgraced—in our national capital I have seen as great poverty and suffering as there is in New York City. In a wealthy, thriving western town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants, a family consisting of fifteen members have been found living in one small room ! And so the savages of civilization are not confined to New York City, and I shall speak of them simply as the most notable examples of suffering humanity in our midst. The total ...