Mrs. Florence Kelley, secretary of the National Consumers' League, delivered the second of the series of lectures, which will be given this winter, on "The Social Problem and its Remedies," in Emerson D yesterday afternoon. Mrs. Kelley's subject was the "Problem in Poverty."

In considering the question of poverty in our modern cities, Mrs. Kelley confined her attention to the conditions of the working classes abroad and in America, and the possibilities of ameliorating their economic status in the future. In developing the subject she drew many illustrations, her examples being chiefly taken from the working girls of New York.

"This week a man died of starvation on Broadway, and the event drew the attention of all the newspapers. Yet, where one person dies of starvation like this there are thousands of people dying of slow and inconspicuous starvation. Professor Chapin, of Beloit College, after having made a study of three hundred families in New York, made the statement that a family of six must have an income of at least $800 each year in order to maintain the efficiency and health of its members. If a smaller income is received, that family may be said to be living in poverty. Yet an income of $800 to an immigrant family of six would be a fortune.

"Rich corporations are continually searching the world over in the hope of bringing in more poverty to increase their own wealth. While this industrial system has killed many victims, it has been at the same time bringing many immigrants out of direst poverty to relative prosperity, for the majority of immigrants improve their condition when they come to this country, no matter how poor they may seem to be here.

"We are not content with bringing in poverty from the outside, but we produce it in a wholesale way. There are three great tragic armies of working girls; those who, because of insufficient wage and excessive work, fall early victims to tuberculosis; those who, due to the strain of long hours, are succumbing to nervous prostration; and those who, because of worrying on the problem of mere existence, yield to melancholia.

"By a decision of the Court of Appeals of New York made in 1886 it is beyond the power of the legislature to protect the home of the poor, by being unable to prevent the introduction of the sweat-shop' into their homes. Whenever it is possible the employer gets his work done in the houses of the poor, because in this way he has not the expense of lighting, heating, and cleaning of a factory to meet.

"Although this array of facts is disheartening, there is every reason to believe that a great movement is on foot which will remedy these terrible conditions in our great cities. If we are going to deal with the social problem in the poverty aspect, we must go beyond maintaining charity organizations. We must stop importing poverty, and we must stop creating poverty, by making it impossible for the industrial organizations of our country to continue their present methods of securing cheap employment regardless of the effect upon the employed."