XXXVII.

POLICE MATRONS.

THE annual report of the Police Department shows that there were 147,634 lodgings in station-houses furnished homeless and friendless persons last year-78,523 to men, and 69,111 to women.

"Oh, it was pitiful!

Near a whole city full,

Home she had none!"

Let us hear no more about "Darkest Africa, and the Way Out" until we have found a way out of "Darkest New York." Think of 82,000 arrests in one year! of which 19,926 were women, 9514 boys under twenty years of age, and 991 of girls under twenty years of age. Most of these arrests were for drunkenness. I would like to know why the poor are always arrested and punished for getting drunk, and the rich never. In other words, it is a crime in New York for a poor man to do what a rich man may do with impunity.

Thousands who apply for lodging in the station-houses are not intoxicated; they are not guilty of any crime; they are only moneyless, homeless, friendless. The men and women, the boys and girls, while not huddled together, are all within hearing and frequently in plain sight of one another; and to compel innocent girls and women to come in contact with the degraded and to be searched by a man certainly tends to make them lose their self-respect, and when a woman once loses that, her case is hopeless indeed. The station-houses of New York need the refining influences which a matron would impart. The objection that the station-house is not a place for a decent woman is the strongest argument possible in favor of the reform. It is unnatural for women to be cared for by persons not of their own sex. Woman knows how to sympathize with woman. In the name of God and decency, I demand that the unfortunate girls and women imprisoned in our station-houses receive the kind treatment which competent matrons alone can give. What is your influence in this matter? We allow men and women to be thrust into cells as if society had a grudge against them, and they in turn have a grudge against society. Give them a hand instead of a heel. Many of them would

leap with joy at the prospect of reformation if there was a way opened for them into decency. Many of them are dying for want of a kind word. Don't blame them. It is not their fault, but their misfortune. They were born that way. If our mothers had been blasphemers and our fathers sots, and we had been rocked in the cradle of vice, we too would sleep in station-houses instead of palaces. Blood always tells, especially bad blood. The wrongs heaped upon the innocent often, and unfortunate always, we should not as Christians be able to behold without, like our pure and pitiful Master, weeping over them. New York in the matter of caring for the homeless poor is a burning disgrace to our boasted Christian civilization. That old legend of a monster to satisfy whose appetite a city had every year to sacrifice a number of its virgins, who, amid the lamentations of their mothers and the grief of their kindred, were led away trembling to his bloody den, is no fable in New York City. That monster is among us.

Woman, have more sympathy for your fallen sisters! Your inhumanity to your own sex makes countless thousands mourn. Woman, be imbued with the large loving-heartedness of the Gospel, that is unhappy if others are miserable, that will not eat its own bread

and drink its own cup alone, that is not content to be safe without also saving others.

Parents, guard your children sedulously. Fold them early. Before the night brings out the ravenous wolf and the wily fox and the roaring lion, have all your lambs at home; prayerfully commit them to the keeping of an all-present God.

XXXVIII.

STRICTURES ON STRIKES.

WAGES can never be equalized. So long as there are more men who can dig ditches than run a railroad, so long will the railroad president get more wages than the digger of ditches. The ox will always eat more than the rabbit. The premium of higher wages is the great incentive to improvement. Take this away and your workmen are like dried apples on a string, all of one sort and all of one size. Our unionworkmen pin each other down, they crush the best laborers down to the level of mediocrity, and cut the heads off their best men.

The capitalists have come up mostly from the multitude. You say they were lucky. I say they were plucky. They got on, but never getting off on sprees, and spending their time in striking and clamoring for higher wages and fewer hours' work per day. They cultivated the higher attributes of manhood, devoted their time to learning how to do better