"Homes, in the civilized sense of the term,
they have never had to keep, and their squalid
abiding -places, overrun with wretched and
quarrelsome half-clad children, and bare of the
commonest comforts of life, have offered very
unattractive fields for womanly originality and
painstaking endeavor. A cheerful, quiet home,
wherein the laborer is always sure of warmth
and light and wholesome food, has in it a
saving grace which all the creeds in Chris-
tendom cannot compass without its auxiliary
aid."

The power of the liquor traffic, and all the
other kindred vices that cluster about it, is
constantly re-enforced by the social conditions
of the neglected tenement house. Temptation
enters as largely into drunkenness as into any
other vice ; and in the foul and fetid courts of
the North End, the West End, South Boston,
and the Cove, temptation to vice of every kind is
ever present. The words of George R. Simms,
in his earnest study of life in the homes of the
London poor, apply with equal force to such



190 WHITE SLAVES

sections in Boston : " The complete lack of
home comforts, the necessity of dulling every
finer sense in order to endure the surrounding
horrors, the absence of anything to enter into
competition with the light and glitter of the
gin palace, and the cheapness of drink in com-
parison with food, all these contribute to make
the poor easy victims to intemperance. Among
the poor, tlie constant war with fate, the harassing
conditions of daily life, and the apparent hope-
lessness of trying to impi-ove their condition, do
undoubtedly tend to make them ' drown their
sorrows,' and rush for relief to the fiery waters
of that Lethe which the publican dispenses at
so much a glass. Ask any of the temperance
workers in the viler districts, and they will tell
you how they have watched hundreds of decent
folk come into a bad neighborhood, and gradually
sink under the degrading influences of their
surroundings. 