On Manhattan Island no adequate housing can be obtained at less than twelve or fourteen dollars a month.

That there is no health in a diet of bread and tea.

That—­curious facts!—­coal burns up, coats and shoes wear out in spite of mending.

That the average housewife cannot take time to go bargain-hunting or experimenting with new food combinations, or in making or mending garments, and neither has she the ability nor training to do so.

That, in fact, the poor, largely speaking, were between the upper and nether millstones of low wages and high prices.

Of course there was the vice, but while drink causes poverty, poverty causes drink.  Joe found intemperance among women; he found little children running to the saloon for cans of beer; he found plenty of men drunkards.  But what things to offset these!  The woman who bought three bushels of coal a week for seventy-five cents, watched her fires, picked out the half-burned pieces, reused them, and wasted no heat; the children foraging the streets for kindling-wood; the family in bed to keep warm; the wife whose husband had pawned her wedding-ring for drink, and who had bought a ten-cent brass one, “to keep the respect of her children”; the man working for ten dollars a week, who once had owned his own saloon, but, so he said, “it was impossible to make money out of a saloon unless I put in gambling-machines or women, and I wouldn’t stand for it”; the woman whose husband was a drunkard, and who, therefore, went to the Battery 5 A.M. to 10, then 5 P.M. to 7, every day to do scrubbing for twenty dollars a month; the wonderful Jewish family whose income was seven hundred and ninety-seven dollars and who yet contrived to save one hundred and twenty-three dollars a year to later send their two boys to Columbia University.

And everywhere he found the miracle of miracles:  the spirit of charity and mutual helpfulness—­the poor aiding the poorer; the exquisite devotion of mothers to children; the courage that braved a terrible life.

For a week the canvass went on.  Joe worked feverishly, and came home late at night too tired almost to undress himself.  Again and again he exclaimed to his mother: 

“I never dreamed of such things!  I never dreamed of such poverty!  I never dreamed of such human nature!”

Greenwich Village, hitherto a shabby red clutter of streets, uninviting, forbidding, dull, squalid, became for Joe the very swarm and drama and warm-blooded life of humanity.  He began to sense the fact that he was in the center of a human whirlpool, in the center of beauty and ugliness, love and bitterness, misery and joy.  The whole neighborhood began to palpitate for him; the stone walls seemed bloody with struggling souls; the pavements stamped with the steps of a battle.

“What can I do,” he kept thinking, “with these people?”

And to his amazement he began to see that just as up-town offered the rivals of luxury, pleasure, and ease, so down-town offered the rivals of intemperance, grinding poverty, ignorance.  His theories were beginning to meet the shock of facts.