continued to exist ever since the euphemistically-termed Reformation, and as it always must exist as long as the Gospel precepts are preached and believed in.

The Reformation, and its child the Revolution, though they have destroyed many a noble monastic building, have not annihilated the monastic life. The tradition has survived, and still exists. In some countries, notably in the Austrian empire, many monastic foundations dating back as far as the seventh and sixth centuries still flourish in the full enjoyment of large possessions and all the influence and prestige that attached to similar institutions in our own country. Even in England the connection has never been broken. Since the coming of Saint Augustine in the sixth century, Benedictine monks have never been wanting on English soil, and at the present moment, besides the monastery in which I am now writing, there are at least three others within the four seas which claim lineal descent from, and even identity with, that very corporation to which the thirteenth-century monasteries belonged. The medieval monasteries of England, therefore, do not need successors. They still exist. Or if they must have successors, such can surely be found elsewhere than in Pall Mall. During the three centuries which have passed since the spoliation of the English monastic houses, numerous religious corporations have sprung into existence, which, without being exactly monastic in their nature, have inherited the principles of monastic life, have taken up much of the work which the monasteries once fulfilled, and, in the altered circumstances of modern life, have taken that hold upon the popular mind which the monasteries once exclusively enjoyed. These may be truly regarded as 'the successors of the thirteenth-century monasteries.' They may not exist in Pall Mall; but in other busy thoroughfares of London and our large towns, as well as in their slums and back streets, will be found the Oratorian and the Passionist, the Redemptorist and the Jesuit, the Father of Charity and the Marist, the Vincentian and the Christian Brother, along with a host of congregations of women, who, under the name of Sisters of Charity or of Mercy, the Little Sisters of the Poor, or Sisters of Notre-Dame, and fifty others, carry on the work of Christian love, by teaching, reclaiming, feeding, clothing, nursing, and caring for the poor and the little ones of Christ. In almost every town, and even in many a country hamlet, will be found these truly worthy successors of the very best days of English monachism, whose selfsacrifice and devotion to the needs and weaknesses of others, not only emulate the deeds of their predecessors, but cry shame upon much of the luxury and heartless self-indulgence which is threatening to eat the heart out of English society. When the Pall Mall clubhouse is the only representative of the monastic ideal in this land, God help England! But we have not yet fallen so low, nor are we likely to do so. The national character is too thorough, too energetic,

too masculine. Even outside the Catholic Church there is a movement of return to the old externals of the higher life.' The vagaries of Llanthony, and some other failures, have been part of the result; but a growing appreciation of the dignity and necessity of selfsacrifice and voluntary self-denial, has also ensued, and much of the old vulgar contempt and uncultured hatred of the name of monk is dying away.

The Rev. Dr. Jessopp finishes in a minor key. The pathetic passage in which he tells us of the wail of the minor crying for the theme that has vanished,' has about it a tone as of the sweeping of his own heart-strings. He may take courage from his own words, for it will yet reappear.' Not indeed as a mere repetition,' for, as he himself says, such is not the way of the harmony' of God's productions. The 'dead' have long ago 'buried their dead,' and even ceased mourning for them. Meanwhile the true successors of the thirteenth-century monasteries are rising up around us, each after their kind.' Downside and Hereford and Ampleforth and Fort Augustus, Buckfast and Erdington, Ramsgate and Mount St. Bernard's, names well known to English Catholics, still carry on the tradition of the Benedictine Rule; while in every district of London and its outskirts, in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, and in fifty other less known localities, are to be found the Carmelite and the Franciscan, the Dominican and the Augustinian, and the long list of foundations of the more modern orders already alluded to-unlike 'the conventuals of St. James's' in many other things, but also in this, that they have a suspicion that they are something like the monks of old.' And so, indeed, they are. They do not lack the old faith, nor the old loyalty, nor even that something else which we can less afford to miss-the old enthusiasm.' If any one doubts it, let him 'come and see.'

ELPHEGE G. CODY, O.S.B.

Fort Augustus, N.B.

THE EMIGRANT IN NEW YORK.

Two months in America, a journey of between four and five thousand miles, and intercourse with one section of a great people! It is only a facet of a many-sided stone, only one leaf off a wide-branching tree; yet even thus it is possible the special study which I was able to make of a single subject about which little is known may be interesting. What I have to say myself is a sketch-a mere sketch from my personal experience; I do not know enough to piece it in or combine it to the larger whole. It must be accepted, as all such sketches should be, as drawn from very limited premises: therefore necessarily onesided, imperfect, and perhaps mistaken.

New York life among the poor has one central distinguishing feature-namely, the fact that all live in tenements or in houses built on much the same principle. This principle is about as bad as it can possibly be. In the typical tenement house the staircase passes up a well in the centre of the house. It has no light from the open air, no ventilation; it is absolutely dark at midday, except for such light as may find its way in from the open hall door or from the glasses over the doors of the flats, and possibly from a skylight at the top of the house. It is a well for all the noxious gases to accumulate in ; it cannot be aired; the rays of the sun never penetrate to it; in the worst houses it is foul with the coming and going of the innumerable denizens of the tenements. On its steps play about the pale, unhealthy children who, even allowing for the enormous death rate,1 still swarm in these horrible dwellings. Can a more frightfully unwholesome system be imagined? Yet this is not the worst. The tenements, opening in flats off these stairs, may be constituted of more or fewer rooms, but as a rule the bedrooms never have direct access to the open air. They open into the living rooms, and their windows open on to the stairs, so that not alone can the bedrooms never be properly aired, but they are so constructed that they receive all the impure gases that accumulate in the central well.

When I first entered the tenement in which I lodged, in a house

Bishop Ireland states, in his lecture to the C. T. A. Union, St. Paul, Minn., August 1882, that in the tenement houses of New York 75 per cent. of all children born die a few years after their birth.'

occupied by twenty labourers' families, I own to a feeling of something like dismay, finding the room stifling, the family wash going on in the sitting-room, and a red-hot stove. The thermometer at the time was up to 90° in the shade. I found my lodging consisted of a bedroom about 6 feet by 5 feet 6 inches; it was almost dark when the door into the living room was closed, the two tiny trap windows opening one on the dark stairs, the other on the outer room. However, I had come to see the life of the respectable poor, and here I experienced it. The whole tenement consisted of a central room about 10 feet by 14 feet or less; off this opened my bedroom de scribed above, and a second, equally tiny, dark, and unventilated, occupied by my host and his wife. All the work of the day went on in these rooms; at six o'clock the stove was lighted, and from that hour till night it was in constant use. All the washing, cooking, ironing, and house work of every kind went on here. A small recess formed the scullery, where was a small sink with water laid on. For this tenement of three rooms-No. 1, 10 feet by 14 feet, Nos. 2 and 3, 6 feet by 5 feet 6 inches-twelve dollars a month was paid. That amounts to nearly 291. a year. As there were said to be twenty tenements in this house, and the one I occupied appeared about the same as the others, the total rental must have been very considerable, though the house was a poor-looking place in a very poor district. may be asked, What was to be seen outside in the street? Filth undescribable, naked-limbed children, slatternly women, emigrant boarding house, saloons, and a population which can be estimated by calculating twenty or thirty families, sometimes many more, to each house. As a sample of the infant mortality resulting from these and other conditions which I shall not describe, I may mention that the dwellers in the tenement adjoining ours, who had lived there twentyeight years, had had eleven children born to them, of whom two pale boys were the survivors.

Another abominable system holds not only in these bad streets, but partially elsewhere in New York, and also in Philadelphia. I will describe it at its worst as seen in Washington Street. The streets universally in New York are, for such a great and handsome city, extraordinarily irregularly paved and flagged; and in the worse parts of the town not only is this the case, but accumulations of filth are permitted to remain apparently indefinitely. To ad to this, along the flagged ways and edging the streets immense boxes and barrels stand before almost every door. These are public ashpits, in which accumulates the refuse of houses inhabited by twenty or thirty families. Only once all the time I was in New York did I see any attempt made to remove this refuse. I should not, I think, be overstating if I were to say that in the length of Washington Street (a long American street) alone many hundreds of tons of animal and vegetable matters decay unremoved in the midst of this

seething population. How the people escape cholera, typhus, and typhoid fever-if they do escape-I cannot understand, putting together the internal arrangements of the houses, the horrible atmosphere outside, the climate with its months of blazing heat, and the almost more trying winter, when the poor either suffer from intense cold or bake in these tiny rooms, a prey to the stove demon.' Since my return from America an Irish-American physician, who has practised for eighteen years in Brooklyn, visited me; he expressed his intention to return to Ireland to reside-and why? That he might be able to rear his children. He spoke of the impossibility of saving the children, of the fearful malarial fevers that sweep away thousands on thousands yearly; though the difficulty of educating and putting out children is greater in Ireland than in America, the immensely greater chance of a perfect physical development in the British Isles weighed more with him. Certainly from what I saw in America I should say this was the great disadvantage of the country, that it affects the rich as well as the poor, that it is not confined to New York-though there it is probably at its worst, that it is only partially remediable, and that probably the remedy must be found in an improved system of heating and ventilation.

But, in the meanwhile, how does it bear on the present vexed question of assisted emigration? What is the Government now trying to do but to send these very people, middle-aged parents and young children who are just the people who ought not to go-out into these very eastern cities, into these vile tenement houses, into these dens of disease, poverty, and immorality. Let not English people be deceived. Let them know what they are doing, and do it if they will, knowing that it is very much of the nature of those social murders that go on unreproved in the light or darkness of our civilisation. I will not stand on my own evidence. I will quote two authorities, neither of them prejudiced against emigration. Mr. John Sweetman-who himself approved so far of emigration as to buy land and form a company to advance it-after some experience writes a small pamphlet, and says in it :

Another plan for helping Irish emigration is to ship a number of families, by means of Government aid or a charitable organisation, to America, and let them there take care of themselves. From inquiries on the spot I find that a few families with a number of young girls can get work in the manufacturing towns of New England, but that no large number can thus be provided for. Four or five families should only be sent at a time. Although any number of industrious single young men and women can support themselves in the large cities, they could not easily support a family owing to the expense of lodging and living. Respectable, steady artisans have even told me that, though earning large wages in the cities, they found it hard to provide for their families and never could lay by anything. . . . I fear that the emigration of destitute families will not succeed at present on a large scale.

Yes; and Mr. Trevelyan informs the House with apparent satisfac