"I hear the tread of coming thousands from these shadows who will laugh at your flag, who know not the name of your President, or your God, whose heavy hands upon your doors will summon you before the tribunal of the knife, the torch, the bomb to make good your right to live.
"When your population shall number ten millions, and the gulf between the rich and poor shall have become impassable, some gigantic corner shall have doubled the price of bread, starvation spread her black wings, and idle thousands sullen and desperate begin to look with darkening brows on your unprotected wealth, then will come the test of modern society.
"This growth of the city is as resistless and inevitable as the movement of time. Why people continue to turn their backs upon the open fields and crowd into this great foul, rattling, crawling, smoking, stinking, ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, oozing poison at every pore, is beyond my ken, but they come. They come each year in hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands, crowding the crowded trades, crowding closer the crowded dens in which human beings whelp and stable as beasts. They leave friends and neighbours who love them, leave earth for hell, and still they come. The tenement, huge monster of modern greed, engulfs them, and the word home is stricken from their tongue.
"They tell us that yesterday a man in a fit of
