desolate.

The landlord marries and sets out on an ocean voyage with his bride. On
the same ship the father of the tubercular family, working as stoker or
deck hand, reaches the last stages of the disease and in his dying hours
is mercifully attended by the bride. She contracts the disease and later
appears weak and fading. The husband, ascertaining the real nature of
her malady, brings her home with the purpose of placing her in the
private sanitarium. There is no room in this institution, but good
accommodations are found in the public sanitarium to which she goes and
where she finds the children from their tenement.

The facts have now been put in such juxtaposition that the husband has a
change of heart. The patients recover and the landlord endows a great
sanitarium for the tuberculous. One may easily criticize the crudeness
of the plot and the improbabilities with which it bristles. But it sets
forth love and death and conversion and an appeal to rescue those who
suffer from the great white plague: and this was sufficient for the
crowd, for all are children when beholding the elemental things of life.
At any rate the women who stood at the exits of the theater selling the
Christmas stamps of the anti-tuberculosis society will tell you that the
purse strings as well as the heart strings of the crowd relaxed to the
crude but deep melody of mercy.

The social hunger also, turning its back upon the meager home and
heightened by the monotony and semi-independence of early toil, takes to
the street. The quest is quickly commercialized and debauched by the
public dance halls which are controlled by the liquor interests. A
recent thorough investigation of 328 of these halls in Chicago showed a
nightly attendance of some 86,000 young people, the average age of the