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He had the ethical bee in his bonnet and was a reformer of no mean pretension, though his work had been mainly in the line of contributions to the heavier reviews and quarterlies and to the publication over his name of brightly, cleverly written books on the working classes and the slum-dwellers.

He had not wanted to engage in charity and material activities; he feared hypocrisy and corruption. But in his writings he lets us see how utterly impossible it is for a man of real heart to do anything for the souls of the slum-dwellers without at the same time helping their diseased and hunger-racked bodies.

All England smells like something boiling, just as all France smells like something that needs boiling. Seemingly the only Londoners who enjoy any extensive variety in their provender are the slum-dwellers.

While much of it was beautiful, it was one of the most unhealthy spots in the world sickness, disease, and swift death attacking the Europeans who ventured there. The natives were considered to be the most degraded of any in Africa. They were, in reality, the slum-dwellers of negro-land.

Now Palus was so popular, so beloved by the slum-dwellers, that whenever he showed a disposition to spare an opponent, the whole mass of the populace were quick with the mercy-signal: the moment they saw Palus sheathe his blade their arms went up with his, almost before his, thumbs as flat as his, never a thumb out nor any fingers clenched.

Only comradeship helped them not always jolly, if they happened to be a class above their fellows, a moral peg above foul-mouthed slum-dwellers and men of filthy habits, but splendid if they were in their own crowd of decent, laughter-loving, companionable lads. Eleven months' training! Were they ever going to the front?

This is vividly supported by the fact brought out in our later investigations of the sputum of slum-dwellers, carried out by city boards of health, that the percentage of individuals harboring the pneumococcus steadily increases all through the winter months, from ten per cent in December to forty-five, fifty, and even sixty per cent in February and March.

But, explain it as we may, the consoling fact remains that civilized races, including slum-dwellers, have a distinctly lower death-rate from tuberculosis than have savage tribes which are exposed to it even under most favorable climatic and hygienic conditions; that those races which have survived longest in city and even slum surroundings have a lower death-rate than the rest of the community under those conditions; and that certain of our urban populations have lower death-rates than many of our rural ones.

Now the Cowgate and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the disorderly night; the slum-dwellers would foregather about the rotting doors of dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts of a past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument.

The other instance furnishes a much more crucial test, as it is carried out upon wild animals under the unfavorable conditions of captivity in a strange climate, like our slum-dwellers from sunny Italy, and comes home to us more closely in many respects, inasmuch as it is concerned with our nearest animal relatives on the biological side monkeys and apes, in zoölogical gardens.