Chapter VI: The Foreign Peril of the City

The city is the most difficult and perplexing problem of modern times.--_Francis Lieber._

We must save the city if we would save the nation. Municipal government and city evangelization together constitute the distinctive problem of the city, for this generation at least.--_Josiah Strong._

Talk of Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture chamber of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and bleeding heart through the shambles of our civilization needs no such fantastic images of the poet to teach him horror.--_General Booth._

With the influx of a large foreign population into the great cities, there have come also foreign customs and institutions, laxity and license--those phases of evil which are the most insidious foes of the purity and strength of a people. The slums of our large cities are but the stagnant pools of illiteracy, vice, pauperism, and crime, annually fed by this floodtide of immigration.--_R. M. Atchison._

You can kill a man with a tenement as easily as with an ax.--_Jacob Riis._

Our foreign colonies are to a large extent in the cities of our own country. To live in one of these foreign communities is actually to live on foreign soil. The thoughts, feelings, and traditions which belong to the mental life of the colony are often entirely alien to an American.--_Robert Hunter._

The vastness of the problem of the city slum, and the impossibility, even with unlimited resources of men and money, of permanently raising the standards of living of many of our immigrants as long as they are crowded together, and as long as the stream of newer immigrants pours into these same slums, has naturally forced itself upon the minds of thinking persons.--_Robert D. Ward._