How the Other Half Lives quotes

Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” That was true then. It did not know because it did not care.

The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.

Homes must be built for the working masses by those who employ their labor; but tenements must cease to be “good property” in the old, heartless sense.

“Philanthropy and five percent” is the penance exacted.

If this is true from a purely economic point of view, what then of the outlook from the Christian standpoint?

Might not the conference have found in the warning of one Brooklyn builder, who has invested his capital on this plan and made it pay more than a money interest, a hint worth heeding:

“How shall the love of God be understood by those who have been nurtured in sight only of the greed of man?”

The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered.

It was the “rear house,” infamous ever after in our city’s history. There had been tenant-houses before, but they were not built for the purpose. Nothing would probably have shocked their original owners more than the idea of their harboring a promiscuous crowd;

and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.”

It was thus the dark bedroom, prolific of untold depravities, came into the world.

It was destined to survive the old houses. In their new role, says the old report, eloquent in its indignant denunciation of “evils more destructive than wars,” “they were not intended to last.

or “one room 12 × 12 with five families living in it, comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two beds, without partition, screen, chair, or table.”

The rate of rent has been successfully maintained to the present day, though the hog at least has been eliminated.

Lest anybody flatter himself with the notion that these were evils of a day that is happily past and may safely be forgotten, let me mention here three very recent instances of tenement-house life that came under my notice.

The fire made homeless ten families, who had paid an average of $5 a month for their mean little cubbyholes. The owner himself told me that it was fully insured for $800, though it brought him in $600 a year rent.

He evidently considered himself especially entitled to be pitied for losing such valuable property.

Another was the case of a hardworking family of man and wife, young people from the old country, who took poison together in a Crosby Street tenement because they were “tired.”

… the immediate neighborhood was concerned, but the Mulberry Street Bend was fast outdoing it in foulness not a stone’s throw away, and new centres of corruption were continually springing up and getting the upper hand whenever vigilance was relaxed for ever so short a time.

It is one of the curses of the tenement-house system that the worst houses exercise a levelling influence upon all the rest, just as one bad boy in a schoolroom will spoil the whole class.

It is one of the ways the evil that was “the result of forgetfulness of the poor,” as the Council of Hygiene mildly put it, has of avenging itself.

The bulletproof shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the Subtreasury are tacit admissions of the fact and of the quality of the mercy expected.

The tenements today are New York, harboring three-fourths of its population.

When another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be?

He looked at me with a puzzled air. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I did.

Some went to California in ’49, some to the war and never came back. The rest, I expect, have gone to heaven, or somewhere.

I don’t see them ’round here.”

The arched gateway leads no longer to a shady bower on the banks of the rushing stream, inviting to daydreams with its gentle repose, but to a dark and nameless alley, shut in by high brick walls, cheerless as the lives of those they shelter.

The wolf knocks loudly at the gate in the troubled dreams that come to this alley, echoes of the day’s cares.

A horde of dirty children play about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it: it is the best it can do.

Vain hope, truly! Nothing more appetizing than a bare-legged ragamuffin appears.

Meat-bones, not long since picked clean, are as scarce in Blind Man’s Alley as elbow-room in any Fourth Ward backyard.

The shouts of the children come hushed over the housetops, as if apologizing for the intrusion. Few glad noises make this old alley ring.

He told me why, when he found time to draw breath. “Why, don’t you know,” he said, “that house is the Dirty Spoon?

It caught fire six times last winter, but it wouldn’t burn. The dirt was so thick on the walls, it smothered the fire!

” Which, if true, shows that water and dirt, not usually held to be harmonious elements, work together for the good of those who insure houses.

They mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs will have another story to tell—Oh! a sadly familiar story—before the day is at an end. The child is dying with measles.

With half a chance it might have lived; but it had none. That dark bedroom killed it.

“It was took all of a suddint,” says the mother, smoothing the throbbing little body with trembling hands.

The spice of hot soapsuds is added to the air already tainted with the smell of boiling cabbage, of rags and uncleanliness all about. It makes an overpowering compound. It is Thursday, but patched linen is hung upon the pulley-line from the window.

There is no Monday cleaning in the tenements. It is washday all the week round, for a change of clothing is scarce among the poor.

They are poverty’s honest badge, these perennial lines of rags hung out to dry, those that are not the washerwoman’s professional shingle. The true line to be drawn between pauperism and honest poverty is the clothesline.

It is washday all the week round, for a change of clothing is scarce among the poor. They are poverty’s honest badge, these perennial lines of rags hung out to dry, those that are not the washerwoman’s professional shingle.

The true line to be drawn between pauperism and honest poverty is the clothesline.

With it begins the effort to be clean that is the first and the best evidence of a desire to be honest.

This gap between dingy brick-walls is the yard.

That strip of smoke-colored sky up there is the heaven of these people. Do you wonder the name does not attract them to the churches?

That baby’s parents live in the rear tenement here. She is at least as clean as the steps we are now climbing. There are plenty of houses with half a hundred such in.

but even where it is not he soon reduces what he does find to his own level, if allowed to follow his natural bent.

The Italian comes in at the bottom, and in the generation that came over the sea he stays there.

In the slums he is welcomed as a tenant who “makes less trouble” than the contentious Irishman or the order-loving German, that is to say: is content to live in a pigsty and submits to robbery at the hands of the rent-collector without murmur.

Echoes of tinkling bells linger there still, but they do not call up memories of green meadows and summer fields; they proclaim the homecoming of the ragpicker’s cart. In the memory of man the old cow-path has never been other than a vast human pigsty.

There is but one “Bend” in the world, and it is enough.

The city authorities, moved by the angry protests of ten years of sanitary reform effort, have decided that it is too much and must come down.

Big, awkward sausages, anything but appetizing, hang in the grocer’s doorway, knocking against the customer’s head as if to remind him that they are there waiting to be bought.

What they are I never had the courage to ask.

Down the street comes a file of women carrying enormous bundles of firewood on their heads, loads of decaying vegetables from the market wagons in their aprons, and each a baby at the breast supported by a sort of sling that prevents it from tumbling …

but inside, in that awful room, with half a dozen persons washing, cooking, and sorting rags, lay the dying baby alongside the stove, where the doctor’s thermometer ran up to 115°!

Perishing for the want of a breath of fresh air in this city of untold charities!

Did not the manager of the Fresh Air Fund write to the pastor of an Italian Church only last year that “no one asked for Italian children,” and hence he could not send any to the country?

He seemed less unconcerned than the rest, but tried hard to make up for it by putting on the boldest air he could. “Come down early,” commented the officer, shoving him along with his stick. “There is need of it.

They don’t last long at this. That stuff is brewed to kill at long range.

”

Their customers, alike homeless and hopeless in their utter wretchedness, are the professional tramps, and these only. The meanest thief is infinitely above the stale-beer level. Once upon that plane there is no escape.

To sink below it is impossible; no one ever rose from it.

One night spent in a stale-beer dive is like the traditional putting on of the uniform of the caste, the discarded rags of an old tramp. That stile once crossed, the lane has no longer a turn;

The pipe, by the way, was of clay, and of the two-for-a-cent kind. But I had to give in.

The man, scarce ten seconds employed at honest labor, even at sitting down, at which he was an undoubted expert, had gone on strike.

He knew his rights and the value of “work,” and was not to be cheated out of either.

The tough does not become a tramp, save in rare instances, when old and broken down. Even then usually he is otherwise disposed of.

The devil has various ways of taking care of his own.

Nor is the tramps’ army recruited from any certain class. All occupations and most grades of society yield to it their contingent of idleness. Occasionally, from one cause or another, a recruit of a better stamp is forced into the ranks;

There is a wider gap between the “hotel”—they are all hotels—that charges a quarter and the one that furnishes a bed for a dime than between the bridal suite and the everyday hall bedroom of the ordinary hostelry.

The metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted candle to the moth.

It attracts them in swarms that come year after year with the vague idea that they can get along here if anywhere; that something is bound to turn up among so many.

The number kept growing until one morning, at the end of two weeks, found by actual count 2,014 shivering creatures in line waiting their turn for a seat at his tables. The shop was closed that day.

It was one of the rare instances of too great a rush of custom wrecking a promising business, and the great problem remained unsolved.

… to descend to the level of the general dullness, and glower at you from doors and windows, from the telegraph pole that is the official organ of Chinatown and from the store signs, with blank, un-meaning stare, suggesting nothing, asking no questions, and answering none.

Fifth Avenue is not duller on a rainy day than Mott Street to one in search of excitement.

Whatever is on foot goes on behind closed doors. Stealth and secretiveness are as much part of the Chinaman in New York as the catlike tread of his felt shoes.

The stranger who enters through the crooked approach is received with sudden silence, a sullen stare, and an angry “Vat you vant?” that breathes annoyance and distrust.

Trust not him who trusts no one, is as safe a rule in Chinatown as out of it.

Were not Mott Street overawed in its isolation, it would not be safe to descend this open cellar-way, through which come the pungent odor of burning opium and the clink of copper coins on the table.

It has nothing in common with them or with their philosophy of life, that the world owes the idler a living. Life here means the hardest kind of work almost from the cradle.

The world as a debtor has no credit in Jewtown.

Its promise to pay wouldn’t buy one of the old hats that are hawked about Hester Street, unless backed by security representing labor done at lowest market rates. But this army of workers must have bread. It is cheap and filling, and bakeries abound.

Little chance on this ground for the campaign of education that alone can bring the needed relief; small wonder that there are whole settlements on this East Side where English is practically an unknown tongue, though the people be both willing and anxious to learn.

“When shall we find time to learn?” asked one of them of me once. I owe him the answer yet.

Take the Second Avenue Elevated Railroad at Chatham Square and ride up half a mile through the sweaters’ district.

Men and women bending over their machines, or ironing clothes at the window, half-naked.

Proprieties do not count on the East Side; nothing counts that cannot be converted into hard cash.

The road is like a big gangway through an endless workroom where vast multitudes are forever laboring. Morning, noon, or night, it makes no difference; the scene is always the same. At Rivington Street let us get off and continue our trip on foot.

Here is one with a young family for which life is bright with promise. Husband and wife work together; just now the latter, a comely young woman, is eating her dinner of dry bread and green pickles.

Pickles are favorite food in Jewtown. They are filling, and keep the children from crying with hunger.

Those who have stomachs like ostriches thrive in spite of them and grow strong—plain proof that they are good to eat. The rest? “Well, they die,” says our guide, dryly. No thought of untimely death comes to disturb this family with life all before it.

Evening has worn into night as we take up our homeward journey through the streets, now no longer silent.

The thousands of lighted windows in the tenements glow like dull red eyes in a huge stone wall.

From every door multitudes of tired men and women pour forth for a half-hour’s rest in the open air before sleep closes the eyes weary with incessant working.

Notice to quit had already been served on them, when the employer decided to give in, frightened by the prospective loss of rent. Asked how long he works, the man says: “from they can see till bedtime.” Bedtime proves to be eleven o’clock.

Seventeen hours a day, seven days in the week, at thirteen cents an hour for the two, six cents and a half for each!

Good average earnings for a tenement-house cigarmaker in summer. In winter it is at least one-fourth less. In spite of it all, the rooms are cleanly kept. From the bedroom farthest back the woman brings out a pile of moist tobacco-leaves to be stripped.

The mother of the three barefooted little children we met on the stairs was taken to the hospital the other day when she could no longer work. She will never come out alive.

There is no waste in these tenements. Lives, like clothes, are worn through and out before put aside.

Her place at the bench is taken already by another who divides with the head of the household his earnings of $15.50 a week.

The color line must be drawn through the tenements to give the picture its proper shading. The landlord does the drawing, does it with an absence of pretence, a frankness of despotism, that is nothing if not brutal.

The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own soil than the New York landlord in his dealings with colored tenants.

Where he permits them to live, they go; where he shuts the door, stay out. By his grace they exist at all in certain localities; his ukase banishes them from others. He accepts the responsibility, when laid at his door, with unruffled complacency.

Where he permits them to live, they go; where he shuts the door, stay out. By his grace they exist at all in certain localities; his ukase banishes them from others. He accepts the responsibility, when laid at his door, with unruffled complacency.

It is business, he will tell you. And it is.

He makes the prejudice in which he traffics pay him well, and that, as he thinks it quite superfluous to tell you, is what he is there for.

… soil from which every blade of grass, every stray weed, every speck of green, has been trodden out, as must inevitably be every gentle thought and aspiration above the mere wants of the body in those whose moral natures such home surroundings are to nourish.

In self-defence, you know, all life eventually accommodates itself to its environment, and human life is no exception.

Within the house there is nothing to supply the want thus left unsatisfied. Tenement-houses have no aesthetic resources. If any are to be brought to bear on them, they must come from the outside.

In self-defence, you know, all life eventually accommodates itself to its environment, and human life is no exception. Within the house there is nothing to supply the want thus left unsatisfied.

Tenement-houses have no aesthetic resources.

If any are to be brought to bear on them, they must come from the outside.

“Better that I take care of them myself,” he repeated to himself as he ground the axe to an edge. Help came in abundance from many almost as poor as they when the desperate straits of the family became known through his arrest.

The readiness of the poor to share what little they have with those who have even less is one of the few moral virtues of the tenements.

Their enormous crowds touch elbow in a closeness of sympathy that is scarcely to be understood out of them, and has no parallel except among the unfortunate women whom the world scorns as outcasts.

But to my mind there is a closer connection between the wages of the tenements and the vices and improvidence of those who dwell in them than, with the guilt of the tenement upon our heads, we are willing to admit even to ourselves.

Weak tea with a dry crust is not a diet to nurse moral strength.

Yet how much better might the fare be expected to be in the family of this “widow with seven children, very energetic and prudent”—I quote again from the report of the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor—whose “eldest girl was employed …

But to me the oldest, the mother, who had struggled along with her daughter making cloaks at half a dollar apiece, twelve long years since the daughter’s husband was killed in a street accident and the city took the children, made the bitter confession:

“We do get so kind o’ downhearted living this way, that we have to be where something is going on, or we just can’t stand it.”

And there was sadder pathos to me in her words than in the whole long story of their struggle with poverty; for unconsciously she voiced the sufferings of thousands, misjudged by a happier world, deemed vicious because they are human and unfortunate.

I am not sure that it is doing much for the tenant to upset this fallacy.

To my mind, to be put out of a tenement would be the height of good luck.

The fact is, however, that evictions are not nearly as common in New York as supposed. The reason is that in the civil courts, the judges of which are elected in their districts, the tenant-voter has solid ground to stand upon at last.

I came upon a couple of youngsters in a Mulberry Street yard a while ago that were chalking on the fence their first lesson in “writin’.” And this is what they wrote: “Keeb of te Grass.”

They had it by heart, for there was not, I verily believe, a green sod within a quarter of a mile.

Home to them is an empty name. Pleasure? A gentleman once catechized a ragged class in a downtown public school on this point, and recorded the result:

And this is what they wrote: “Keeb of te Grass.” They had it by heart, for there was not, I verily believe, a green sod within a quarter of a mile.

Home to them is an empty name.

Pleasure? A gentleman once catechized a ragged class in a downtown public school on this point, and recorded the result:

… a score of years an army of twenty-five thousand of these forlorn little waifs have cried out from the streets of New York in arraignment of a Christian civilization under the blessings of which the instinct of motherhood even was smothered by poverty and want.

Only the poor abandon their children.

The stories of richly-dressed foundlings that are dished up in the newspapers at intervals are pure fiction. Not one instance of even a well-dressed infant having been picked up in the streets is on record.

A handful of baby-farms have been registered and licensed by the Board of Health with the approval of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the last five years, but none of this kind.

The devil keeps the only complete register to be found anywhere.

Their trace is found oftenest by the coroner or the police; sometimes they may be discovered hiding in the advertising columns of certain newspapers, under the guise of the scarcely less heartless traffic in helpless children that is dignified with the pretence of adoption—for cash.

The law has fought this most heinous of crimes by compelling the registry of all baby-farms. As well might it require all persons intending murder to register their purpose with time and place of the deed under the penalty of exemplary fines.

Murderers do not hang out a shingle.

“Baby-farms,” said once Mr. Elbridge T.

It is with a sense of glad relief that one turns from this misery to the brighter page of the helping hands stretched forth on every side to save the young and the helpless.

New York is, I firmly believe, the most charitable city in the world.

Nowhere is there so eager a readiness to help, when it is known that help is worthily wanted;

But that would only be his second mistake.

The Street Arab has all the faults and all the virtues of the lawless life he leads.

Vagabond that he is, acknowledging no authority and owing no allegiance to anybody or anything, with his grimy fist raised against society whenever it tries to coerce him, he is as bright and sharp as the weasel, which, among all the predatory beasts, he most …

The stereotyped promise of the clerks who fail to find his name on the books among the arrests, that he “will come back when he gets hungry,” does not always come true.

More likely he went away because he was hungry.

Some are orphans, actually or in effect, thrown upon the world when their parents were “sent up” to the island or to Sing Sing, and somehow overlooked by the “Society,” which thenceforth became the enemy to be shunned until growth and dirt and the hardships …

Some on us had to go.” And so he went, to make a living by blacking boots. The going is easy enough.

There is very little to hold the boy who has never known anything but a home in a tenement.

Very soon the wild life in the streets holds him fast, and thenceforward by his own effort there is no escape.

In the great Duane Street lodging-house for newsboys, they are succinctly stated in a “notice” over the door that reads thus:

“Boys who swear and chew tobacco cannot sleep here.”

There is another unwritten condition, viz.: that the boy shall be really without a home;

They were quite turbulent, to the disgust of one of their number who assumed, unasked, the office of general manager of the show, and expressed his mortification to me in very polite language.

“If they would only behave, sir!” he complained, “you could make a good picture.”

“Yes,” I said, “but it isn’t in them, I suppose.”

They were going with him out to live on the fat of the land in the fertile West, where they would never be wanting for a crust.

Alas! for the best-laid plans of mice and men.

The Western diet did not agree with either. I saw their owner some months later in the old home at the Five Points. He had come back, walking part of the way, and was now pleading to be sent out once more.

He had come back, walking part of the way, and was now pleading to be sent out once more. He had at last had enough of the city. His face fell when I asked him about the mice. It was a sad story, indeed.

“They had so much corn to eat,” he said, “and they couldn’t stand it. They burned all up inside, and then they busted.”

Mrs.

Uptown the account stands a little better, but there are easily ten saloons to every church today. I am afraid, too, that the congregations are larger by a good deal; certainly the attendance is steadier and the contributions more liberal the week round, Sunday included.

Turn and twist it as we may, over against every bulwark for decency and morality which society erects, the saloon projects its colossal shadow, omen of evil wherever it falls into the lives of the poor.

Nowhere is its mark so broad or so black. To their misery it sticketh closer than a brother, persuading them that within its doors only is refuge, relief.

With the poison dealt out there he takes his politics, in quality not far apart. As the source, so the stream.

The rumshop turns the political crank in New York. The natural yield is rum politics.

Of what that means, successive Boards of Aldermen, composed in a measure, if not of a majority, of dive-keepers, have given New York a taste.

Nowhere is its mark so broad or so black. To their misery it sticketh closer than a brother, persuading them that within its doors only is refuge, relief.

It has the best of the argument, too, for it is true, worse pity, that in many a tenement-house block the saloon is the one bright and cheery and humanly decent spot to be found.

It is a sorry admission to make, that to bring the rest of the neighborhood up to the level of the saloon would be one way of squelching it; but it is so. Wherever the tenements thicken, it multiplies.

Those who have made the matter a study estimate it at a thousand, more or less. The police make occasional schedules of a few and report them to headquarters. Perhaps there is a farce in the police court, and there the matter ends.

Rum and “influence” are synonymous terms.

The interests of the one rarely suffer for the want of attention from the other.

Its gangs are made up of the American-born sons of English, Irish, and German parents. They reflect exactly the conditions of the tenements from which they sprang.

Murder is as congenial to Cherry Street or to Battle Row, as quiet and order to Murray Hill.

The “assimilation” of Europe’s oppressed hordes, upon which our Fourth of July orators are fond of dwelling, is perfect. The product is our own.

Its gangs are made up of the American-born sons of English, Irish, and German parents. They reflect exactly the conditions of the tenements from which they sprang. Murder is as congenial to Cherry Street or to Battle Row, as quiet and order to Murray Hill.

The “assimilation” of Europe’s oppressed hordes, upon which our Fourth of July orators are fond of dwelling, is perfect. The product is our own.

Such is the genesis of New York’s gangs. Their history is not so easily written. It would embrace the largest share of our city’s criminal history for two generations back, every page of it dyed red with blood.

From all this it might be inferred that the New York tough is a very fierce individual, of indomitable courage and naturally as bloodthirsty as a tiger. On the contrary he is an arrant coward.

His instincts of ferocity are those of the wolf rather than the tiger. It is only when he hunts with the pack that he is dangerous.

Then his inordinate vanity makes him forget all fear or caution in the desire to distinguish himself before his fellows, a result of his swallowing all the flash literature and penny-dreadfuls he can beg, borrow, or steal—and there is never any lack of them—and of …

The policeman knows of but one cure for the tough, the club, and he lays it on without stint whenever and wherever he has the chance, knowing right well that, if caught at a disadvantage, he will get his outlay back with interest.

Words are worse than wasted in the gang-districts.

It is a blow at sight, and the tough thus accosted never stops to ask questions. Unless he is “wanted” for some signal outrage, the policeman rarely bothers with arresting him.

The tipsy wayfarer is their chosen victim, and they seldom have to look for him long.

One has not far to go to the river from any point in New York.

The man who does not know where he is going is sure to reach it sooner or later. Should he foolishly resist or make an outcry—dead men tell no tales.

The tipsy wayfarer is their chosen victim, and they seldom have to look for him long. One has not far to go to the river from any point in New York.

The man who does not know where he is going is sure to reach it sooner or later.

Should he foolishly resist or make an outcry—dead men tell no tales. “Floaters” come ashore every now and then with pockets turned inside out, not always evidence of a postmortem inspection by dock-rats.

Indeed, the last thing a New York tough will admit is that he is a thief. He dignifies his calling with the pretence of gambling.

He does not steal: he “wins” your money or your watch, and on the police returns he is a “speculator.”

If, when he passes around the hat for “voluntary” contributions, any storekeeper should have the temerity to refuse to chip in, he may look for a visit from the gang on the first dark night, and account himself lucky if his place escapes being altogether …

One of the causes for fine in a certain large store was sitting down. The law requiring seats for saleswomen, generally ignored, was obeyed faithfully in this establishment.

The seats were there, but the girls were fined when found using them.

Cash-girls receiving $1.75 a week for work that at certain seasons lengthened their day to sixteen hours were sometimes required to pay for their aprons.

… at a dollar and a half a dozen—the very expert sewers able to make from eight to ten, the common run five or six—neckties at from 25 to 75 cents a dozen, with a dozen as a good day’s work, are specimens of women’s wages.

And yet people persist in wondering at the poor quality of work done in the tenements!

Italian cheap labor has come of late also to possess this poor field, with the sweater in its train.

The very paths that have effaced the saving “limit,” and to which it is declared to be “inevitable that they must in many instances resort.” Let the moralist answer.

Let the wise economist apply his rule of supply and demand, and let the answer be heard in this city of a thousand charities where justice goes begging.

To the everlasting credit of New York’s working-girl let it be said that, rough though her road be, all but hopeless her battle with life, only in the rarest instances does she go astray. As a class she is brave, virtuous, and true.

There are houses that have been corrupted through and through by this pestilence, until their very atmosphere breathes beggary. More than a hundred and twenty pauper families have been reported from time to time as living in one such tenement.

The truth is that pauperism grows in the tenements as naturally as weeds in a garden lot.

A moral distemper, like crime, it finds there its most fertile soil. All the surroundings of tenement-house life favor its growth, and where once it has taken root it is harder to dislodge than the most virulent of physical diseases.

Granted that it is bad, there is still something, a possible handle by which to catch him. To the pauper there is none.

He is as hopeless as his own poverty.

I speak of the pauper, not of the honestly poor. There is a sharp line between the two; but athwart it stands the tenement, all the time blurring and blotting it out.

So this wagon was invented by a clever doctor to afford them at once exercise and amusement. A merry-go-round in the grounds suggests a variation of this scheme.

Ghastly suggestion of mirth, with that stricken host advancing on its aimless journey!

As we stop to see it pass, the plaintive strains of a familiar song float through a barred window in the gray stone building. The voice is sweet, but inexpressibly sad:

The man was arrested, of course, and locked up. Today he is probably in a madhouse, forgotten. And the carriages roll by to and from the big stores with their gay throng of shoppers.

The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.

Nevertheless the man and his knife had a mission. They spoke in their ignorant, impatient way the warning one of the most conservative, dispassionate of public bodies had sounded only a little while before:

… the problem of ignorant poverty versus ignorant wealth that has come down to us unsolved, the danger-cry of which we have lately heard in the shout that never should have been raised on American soil—the shout of “the masses against the classes”—the solution of violence.

There is another solution, that of justice. The choice is between the two. Which shall it be?

“Well!” say some well-meaning people; “we don’t see the need of putting it in that way. We have been down among the tenements, looked them over. There are a good many people there; they are not comfortable, perhaps. What would you have? They are poor.

Here again the reason may be the same: the breed is not so old. A few generations more in the slums, and all that will be changed. To get at the pregnant facts of tenement-house life one must look beneath the surface.

Many an apple has a fair skin and a rotten core.

There is a much better argument for the tenements in the assurance of the Registrar of Vital Statistics that the death-rate of these houses has of late been brought below the general death-rate of the city, and that it is lowest in the biggest houses.

The “dangerous classes” of New York long ago compelled recognition.

They are dangerous less because of their own crimes than because of the criminal ignorance of those who are not of their kind.

The danger to society comes not from the poverty of the tenements, but from the ill-spent wealth that reared them, that it might earn a usurious interest from a class from which “nothing else was expected.”

I told him, “No! for you cannot expect to find an inner man to appeal to in the worst tenement-house surroundings.

You must first put the man where he can respect himself.

To reverse the argument of the apple: you cannot expect to find a sound core in a rotten fruit.”

Expert management of model tenements succeeds where amateur management, with the best intentions, gives up the task, discouraged, as a flat failure. Some of the best-conceived enterprises, backed by abundant capital and goodwill, have been wrecked on this rock.

Sentiment, having prompted the effort, forgot to stand aside and let business make it.

Business, in a wider sense, has done more than all other agencies together to wipe out the worst tenements. It has been New York’s real Napoleon III, from whose decree there was no appeal.

This is true particularly of the poorest. They are shiftless, destructive, and stupid; in a word, they are what the tenements have made them.

It is a dreary old truth that those who would fight for the poor must fight the poor to do it.

It must be confessed that there is little enough in their past experience to inspire confidence in the sincerity of the effort to help them.

I am inclined to think that such houses are liable to fall even below the average level.

Backsliding in brick and mortar does not greatly differ from similar performances in flesh and blood.

Backed by a strong and steady sentiment, such as these pioneers have evinced, that would make it the personal business of wealthy owners with time to spare to look after their tenants, the law would be able in a very short time to work a …