THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLEYS.
Down below Chatham Square, in the old Fourth Ward, where the cradle
of the tenement stood, we shall find New York's Other Half at home,
receiving such as care to call and are not afraid. Not all of it,
to be sure, there is not room for that; but a fairly representative
gathering, representative of its earliest and worst traditions. There
is nothing to be afraid of. In this metropolis, let it be understood,
there is no public street where the stranger may not go safely by day
and by night, provided he knows how to mind his own business and is
sober. His coming and going will excite little interest, unless he is
suspected of being a truant officer, in which case he will be impressed
with the truth of the observation that the American stock is dying out
for want of children. If he escapes this suspicion and the risk of
trampling upon, or being himself run down by the bewildering swarms of
youngsters that are everywhere or nowhere as the exigency and their
quick scent of danger direct, he will see no reason for dissenting
from that observation. Glimpses caught of the parents watching the
youngsters play from windows or open doorways will soon convince him
that the native stock is in no way involved.
Leaving the Elevated Railroad where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge
at Franklin Square, scarce a dozen steps will take us where we wish to
go. With its rush and roar echoing yet in our ears, we have turned
the corner from prosperity to poverty. We stand upon the domain of
the tenement. In the shadow of the great stone abutments the old
Knickerbocker houses linger like ghosts of a departed day. Down the
winding slope of Cherry Street--proud and fashionable Cherry Hill that
was--their broad steps, sloping roofs, and dormer windows are easily
made out; all the more easily for the contrast with the ugly barracks
that elbow them right and left. These never had other design than to
shelter, at as little outlay as possible, the greatest crowds out
of which rent could be wrung. They were the bad after-thought of a
heedless day. The years have brought to the old houses unhonored age,
a querulous second childhood that is out of tune with the time, their
tenants, the neighbors, and cries out against them and against you in
fretful protest in every step on their rotten floors or squeaky stairs.
Good cause have they for their fretting. This one, with its shabby
front and poorly patched roof, what glowing firesides, what happy
children may it once have owned? Heavy feet, too often with unsteady
step, for the pot-house is next door--where is it not next door in
these slums?--have worn away the brown-stone steps since; the broken
columns at the door have rotted away at the base. Of the handsome
cornice barely a trace is left. Dirt and desolation reign in the wide
hallway, and danger lurks on the stairs. Rough pine boards fence off
the roomy fire-places--where coal is bought by the pail at the rate of
twelve dollars a ton these have no place. The arched gateway leads no
longer to a shady bower on the banks of the rushing stream, inviting to
day-dreams 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. These are the children of the tenements, the growing
generation of the slums; this their home. From the great highway
overhead, along which throbs the life-tide of two great cities, one
might drop a pebble into half a dozen such alleys.
[Illustration: AT THE CRADLE OF THE TENEMENT.--DOORWAY OF AN
OLD-FASHIONED DWELLING ON CHERRY HILL.]
One yawns just across the street; not very broadly, but it is not
to blame. The builder of the old gateway had no thought of its ever
becoming a public thoroughfare. Once inside it widens, but only to
make room for a big box-like building with the worn and greasy look
of the slum tenement that is stamped alike on the houses and their
tenants down here, even on the homeless cur that romps with the
children in yonder building lot, with an air of expectant interest
plainly betraying the forlorn hope that at some stage of the game a
meat-bone may show up in the role of "It." 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 back-yard. The shouts of the children
come hushed over the house-tops, as if apologizing for the intrusion.
Few glad noises make this old alley ring. Morning and evening it echoes
with the gentle, groping tap of the blind man's staff as he feels his
way to the street. Blind Man's Alley bears its name for a reason.
Until little more than a year ago its dark burrows harbored a colony
of blind beggars, tenants of a blind landlord, old Daniel Murphy, whom
every child in the ward knows, if he never heard of the President
of the United States. "Old Dan" made a big fortune--he told me once
four hundred thousand dollars--out of his alley and the surrounding
tenements, only to grow blind himself in extreme old age, sharing in
the end the chief hardship of the wretched beings whose lot he had
stubbornly refused to better that he might increase his wealth. Even
when the Board of Health at last compelled him to repair and clean
up the worst of the old buildings, under threat of driving out the
tenants and locking the doors behind them, the work was accomplished
against the old man's angry protests. He appeared in person before the
Board to argue his case, and his argument was characteristic.
"I have made my will," he said. "My monument stands waiting for me in
Calvary. I stand on the very brink of the grave, blind and helpless,
and now (here the pathos of the appeal was swept under in a burst of
angry indignation) do you want me to build and get skinned, skinned?
These people are not fit to live in a nice house. Let them go where
they can, and let my house stand."
In spite of the genuine anguish of the appeal, it was downright amusing
to find that his anger was provoked less by the anticipated waste of
luxury on his tenants than by distrust of his own kind, the builder.
He knew intuitively what to expect. The result showed that Mr. Murphy
had gauged his tenants correctly. The cleaning up process apparently
destroyed the home-feeling of the alley; many of the blind people moved
away and did not return. Some remained, however, and the name has clung
to the place.
Some idea of what is meant by a sanitary "cleaning up" in these slums
may be gained from the account of a mishap I met with once, in taking a
flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars in one of the tenements
down here. With unpractised hands I managed to set fire to the house.
When the blinding effect of the flash had passed away and I could see
once more, I discovered that a lot of paper and rags that hung on the
wall were ablaze. There were six of us, five blind men and women who
knew nothing of their danger, and myself, in an attic room with a
dozen crooked, rickety stairs between us and the street, and as many
households as helpless as the one whose guest I was all about us. The
thought: how were they ever to be got out? made my blood run cold as I
saw the flames creeping up the wall, and my first impulse was to bolt
for the street and shout for help. The next was to smother the fire
myself, and I did, with a vast deal of trouble. Afterward, when I came
down to the street I told a friendly policeman of my trouble. For some
reason he thought it rather a good joke, and laughed immoderately at my
concern lest even then sparks should be burrowing in the rotten wall
that might yet break out in flame and destroy the house with all that
were in it. 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.
Sunless and joyless though it be, Blind Man's Alley has that which its
compeers of the slums vainly yearn for. It has a pay-day. Once a year
sunlight shines into the lives of its forlorn crew, past and present.
In June, when the Superintendent of Out-door Poor distributes the
twenty thousand dollars annually allowed the poor blind by the city, in
half-hearted recognition of its failure to otherwise provide for them,
Blindman's Alley takes a day off and goes to "see" Mr. Blake. That
night it is noisy with unwonted merriment. There is scraping of squeaky
fiddles in the dark rooms, and cracked old voices sing long-forgotten
songs. Even the blind landlord rejoices, for much of the money goes
into his coffers.
[Illustration: UPSTAIRS IN BLINDMAN'S ALLEY.]
From their perch up among the rafters Mrs. Gallagher's blind boarders
might hear, did they listen, the tramp of the policeman always on
duty in Gotham Court, half a stone's throw away. His beat, though it
takes in but a small portion of a single block, is quite as lively
as most larger patrol rounds. A double row of five-story tenements,
back to back under a common roof, extending back from the street two
hundred and thirty-four feet, with barred openings in the dividing
wall, so that the tenants may see but cannot get at each other from
the stairs, makes the "court." Alleys--one wider by a couple of feet
than the other, whence the distinction Single and Double Alley--skirt
the barracks on either side. Such, briefly, is the tenement that has
challenged public attention more than any other in the whole city and
tested the power of sanitary law and rule for forty years. The name of
the pile is not down in the City Directory, but in the public records
it holds an unenviable place. It was here the mortality rose during the
last great cholera epidemic to the unprecedented rate of 195 in 1,000
inhabitants. In its worst days a full thousand could not be packed into
the court, though the number did probably not fall far short of it.
Even now, under the management of men of conscience, and an agent, a
King's Daughter, whose practical energy, kindliness and good sense have
done much to redeem its foul reputation, the swarms it shelters would
make more than one fair-sized country village. The mixed character of
the population, by this time about equally divided between the Celtic
and the Italian stock, accounts for the iron bars and the policeman. It
was an eminently Irish suggestion that the latter was to be credited
to the presence of two German families in the court, who "made trouble
all the time." A Chinaman whom I questioned as he hurried past the iron
gate of the alley, put the matter in a different light. "Lem Ilish
velly bad," he said. Gotham Court has been the entering wedge for the
Italian element, who until recently had not attained a foothold in the
Fourth Ward, but are now trailing across Chatham Street from their
stronghold in "the Bend" in ever increasing numbers, seeking, according
to their wont, the lowest level.
It is curious to find that this notorious block, whose name was so long
synonymous with all that was desperately bad, was originally built (in
1851) by a benevolent Quaker for the express purpose of rescuing the
poor people from the dreadful rookeries they were then living in. How
long it continued a model tenement is not on record. It could not have
been very long, for already in 1862, ten years after it was finished, a
sanitary official counted 146 cases of sickness in the court, including
"all kinds of infectious disease," from small-pox down, and reported
that of 138 children born in it in less than three years 61 had died,
mostly before they were one year old. Seven years later the inspector
of the district reported to the Board of Health that "nearly ten per
cent. of the population is sent to the public hospitals each year."
When the alley was finally taken in hand by the authorities, and, as a
first step toward its reclamation, the entire population was driven out
by the police, experience dictated, as one of the first improvements to
be made, the putting in of a kind of sewer-grating, so constructed, as
the official report patiently puts it, "as to prevent the ingress of
persons disposed to make a hiding-place" of the sewer and the cellars
into which they opened. The fact was that the big vaulted sewers had
long been a runway for thieves--the Swamp Angels--who through them
easily escaped when chased by the police, as well as a storehouse for
their plunder. The sewers are there to-day; in fact the two alleys are
nothing but the roofs of these enormous tunnels in which a man may
walk upright the full distance of the block and into the Cherry Street
sewer--if he likes the fun and is not afraid of rats. Could their grimy
walls speak, the big canals might tell many a startling tale. But they
are silent enough, and so are most of those whose secrets they might
betray. The flood-gates connecting with the Cherry Street main are
closed now, except when the water is drained off. Then there were no
gates, and it is on record that the sewers were chosen as a short cut
habitually by residents of the court whose business lay on the line
of them, near a manhole, perhaps, in Cherry Street, or at the river
mouth of the big pipe when it was clear at low tide. "Me Jimmy," said
one wrinkled old dame, who looked in while we were nosing about under
Double Alley, "he used to go to his work along down Cherry Street that
way every morning and come back at night." The associations must have
been congenial. Probably "Jimmy" himself fitted into the landscape.
Half-way back from the street in this latter alley is a tenement,
facing the main building, on the west side of the way, that was
not originally part of the court proper. It stands there a curious
monument to a Quaker's revenge, a living illustration of the power of
hate to perpetuate its bitter fruit beyond the grave. The lot upon
which it is built was the property of John Wood, brother of Silas,
the builder of Gotham Court. He sold the Cherry Street front to a man
who built upon it a tenement with entrance only from the street. Mr.
Wood afterward quarrelled about the partition line with his neighbor,
Alderman Mullins, who had put up a long tenement barrack on his lot
after the style of the Court, and the Alderman knocked him down.
Tradition records that the Quaker picked himself up with the quiet
remark, "I will pay thee for that, friend Alderman," and went his
way. His manner of paying was to put up the big building in the rear
of 34 Cherry Street with an immense blank wall right in front of the
windows of Alderman Mullins's tenements, shutting out effectually
light and air from them. But as he had no access to the street from
his building for many years it could not be let or used for anything,
and remained vacant until it passed under the management of the Gotham
Court property. Mullins's Court is there yet, and so is the Quaker's
vengeful wall that has cursed the lives of thousands of innocent people
since. At its farther end the alley between the two that begins inside
the Cherry Street tenement, six or seven feet wide, narrows down to
less than two feet. It is barely possible to squeeze through; but few
care to do it, for the rift leads to the jail of the Oak Street police
station, and therefore is not popular with the growing youth of the
district.
There is crape on the door of the Alderman's court as we pass out, and
upstairs in one of the tenements preparations are making for a wake. A
man lies dead in the hospital who was cut to pieces in a "can racket"
in the alley on Sunday. The sway of the excise law is not extended to
these back alleys. It would matter little if it were. There are secret
by-ways, and some it is not held worth while to keep secret, along
which the "growler" wanders at all hours and all seasons unmolested.
It climbed the stairs so long and so often that day that murder
resulted. It is nothing unusual on Cherry Street, nothing to "make a
fuss" about. Not a week before, two or three blocks up the street, the
police felt called upon to interfere in one of these can rackets at
two o'clock in the morning, to secure peace for the neighborhood. The
interference took the form of a general fusillade, during which one of
the disturbers fell off the roof and was killed. There was the usual
wake and nothing more was heard of it. What, indeed, was there to say?
The "Rock of Ages" is the name over the door of a low saloon that
blocks the entrance to another alley, if possible more forlorn and
dreary than the rest, as we pass out of the Alderman's court. It sounds
like a jeer from the days, happily past, when the "wickedest man in New
York" lived around the corner a little way and boasted of his title.
One cannot take many steps in Cherry Street without encountering some
relic of past or present prominence in the ways of crime, scarce one
that does not turn up specimen bricks of the coming thief. The Cherry
Street tough is all-pervading. Ask Superintendent Murray, who, as
captain of the Oak Street squad, in seven months secured convictions
for theft, robbery, and murder aggregating no less than five hundred
and thirty years of penal servitude, and he will tell you his opinion
that the Fourth Ward, even in the last twenty years, has turned out
more criminals than all the rest of the city together.
But though the "Swamp Angels" have gone to their reward, their
successors carry on business at the old stand as successfully, if not
as boldly. There goes one who was once a shining light in thiefdom.
He has reformed since, they say. The policeman on the corner, who is
addicted to a professional unbelief in reform of any kind, will tell
you that while on the Island once he sailed away on a shutter, paddling
along until he was picked up in Hell Gate by a schooner's crew, whom
he persuaded that he was a fanatic performing some sort of religious
penance by his singular expedition. Over yonder, Tweed, the arch-thief,
worked in a brush-shop and earned an honest living before he took
to politics. As we stroll from one narrow street to another the odd
contrast between the low, old-looking houses in front and the towering
tenements in the back yards grows even more striking, perhaps because
we expect and are looking for it. Nobody who was not would suspect the
presence of the rear houses, though they have been there long enough.
Here is one seven stories high behind one with only three floors. Take
a look into this Roosevelt Street alley; just about one step wide,
with a five-story house on one side that gets its light and air--God
help us for pitiful mockery!--from this slit between brick walls.
There are no windows in the wall on the other side; it is perfectly
blank. The fire-escapes of the long tenement fairly touch it; but the
rays of the sun, rising, setting, or at high noon, never do. It never
shone into the alley from the day the devil planned and man built it.
There was once an English doctor who experimented with the sunlight
in the soldiers' barracks, and found that on the side that was shut
off altogether from the sun the mortality was one hundred per cent.
greater than on the light side, where its rays had free access. But
then soldiers are of some account, have a fixed value, if not a very
high one. The people who live here have not. The horse that pulls the
dirt-cart one of these laborers loads and unloads is of ever so much
more account to the employer of his labor than he and all that belongs
to him. Ask the owner; he will not attempt to deny it, if the horse
is worth anything. The man too knows it. It is the one thought that
occasionally troubles the owner of the horse in the enjoyment of his
prosperity, built of and upon the successful assertion of the truth
that all men are created equal.
With what a shock did the story of yonder Madison Street alley come
home to New Yorkers one morning, eight or ten years ago, when a fire
that broke out after the men had gone to their work swept up those
narrow stairs and burned up women and children to the number of a
full half score. There were fire-escapes, yes! but so placed that
they could not be reached. The firemen had to look twice before they
could find the opening that passes for a thoroughfare; a stout man
would never venture in. Some wonderfully heroic rescues were made at
that fire by people living in the adjoining tenements. Danger and
trouble--of the imminent kind, not the everyday sort that excites
neither interest nor commiseration--run even this common clay into
heroic moulds on occasion; occasions that help us to remember that
the gap that separates the man with the patched coat from his wealthy
neighbor is, after all, perhaps but a tenement. Yet, what a gap! and of
whose making? Here, as we stroll along Madison Street, workmen are busy
putting the finishing touches to the brown-stone front of a tall new
tenement. This one will probably be called an apartment house. They are
carving satyrs' heads in the stone, with a crowd of gaping youngsters
looking on in admiring wonder. Next door are two other tenements,
likewise with brown-stone fronts, fair to look at. The youngest of the
children in the group is not too young to remember how their army of
tenants was turned out by the health officers because the houses had
been condemned as unfit for human beings to live in. The owner was a
wealthy builder who "stood high in the community." Is it only in our
fancy that the sardonic leer on the stone faces seems to list that
way? Or is it an introspective grin? We will not ask if the new house
belongs to the same builder. He too may have reformed.
We have crossed the boundary of the Seventh Ward. Penitentiary Row,
suggestive name for a block of Cherry Street tenements, is behind us.
Within recent days it has become peopled wholly with Hebrews, the
overflow from Jewtown adjoining, pedlars and tailors, all of them. It
is odd to read this legend from other days over the door: "No pedlars
allowed in this house." These thrifty people are not only crowding into
the tenements of this once exclusive district--they are buying them.
The Jew runs to real estate as soon as he can save up enough for a
deposit to clinch the bargain. As fast as the old houses are torn down,
towering structures go up in their place, and Hebrews are found to be
the builders. Here is a whole alley nicknamed after the intruder, Jews'
Alley. But abuse and ridicule are not weapons to fight the Israelite
with. He pockets them quietly with the rent and bides his time. He
knows from experience, both sweet and bitter, that all things come to
those who wait, including the houses and lands of their persecutors.
Here comes a pleasure party, as gay as any on the avenue, though the
carry-all is an ash-cart. The father is the driver and he has taken
his brown-legged boy for a ride. How proud and happy they both look
up there on their perch! The queer old building they have halted in
front of is "The Ship," famous for fifty years as a ramshackle tenement
filled with the oddest crowd. No one knows why it is called "The Ship,"
though there is a tradition that once the river came clear up here
to Hamilton Street, and boats were moored along-side it. More likely
it is because it is as bewildering inside as a crazy old ship, with
its ups and downs of ladders parading as stairs, and its unexpected
pitfalls. But Hamilton Street, like Water Street, is not what it was.
The missions drove from the latter the worst of its dives. A sailors'
mission has lately made its appearance in Hamilton Street, but there
are no dives there, nothing worse than the ubiquitous saloon and tough
tenements.
Enough of them everywhere. Suppose we look into one? No. -- Cherry
Street. Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might
stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it
would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little
else. Here where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a
step, and another, another. A flight of stairs. You can feel your way,
if you cannot see it. Close? Yes! What would you have? All the fresh
air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is
forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn
receive from the stairs their sole supply of the elements God meant to
be free, but man deals out with such niggardly hand. That was a woman
filling her pail by the hydrant you just bumped against. The sinks
are in the hallway, that all the tenants may have access--and all be
poisoned alike by their summer stenches. Hear the pump squeak! It is
the lullaby of tenement-house babes. In summer, when a thousand thirsty
throats pant for a cooling drink in this block, it is worked in vain.
But the saloon, whose open door you passed in the hall, is always
there. The smell of it has followed you up. Here is a door. Listen!
That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail--what do they mean?
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. There is no unkindness in
the rough voice of the man in the jumper, who sits by the window grimly
smoking a clay pipe, with the little life ebbing out in his sight,
bitter as his words sound: "Hush, Mary! If we cannot keep the baby,
need we complain--such as we?"
[Illustration: AN OLD REAR-TENEMENT IN ROOSEVELT STREET.]
Such as we! What if the words ring in your ears as we grope our way
up the stairs and down from floor to floor, listening to the sounds
behind the closed doors--some of quarrelling, some of coarse songs,
more of profanity. They are true. When the summer heats come with their
suffering they have meaning more terrible than words can tell. Come
over here. Step carefully over this baby--it is a baby, spite of its
rags and dirt--under these iron bridges called fire-escapes, but loaded
down, despite the incessant watchfulness of the firemen, with broken
household goods, with wash-tubs and barrels, over which no man could
climb from a fire. 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. The tenement is much like the one in front we just
left, only fouler, closer, darker--we will not say more cheerless. The
word is a mockery. A hundred thousand people lived in rear tenements in
New York last year. Here is a room neater than the rest. The woman, a
stout matron with hard lines of care in her face, is at the wash-tub.
"I try to keep the childer clean," she says, apologetically, but with
a hopeless glance around. The spice of hot soap-suds 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
clothes-line. With it begins the effort to be clean that is the first
and the best evidence of a desire to be honest.
What sort of an answer, think you, would come from these tenements to
the question "Is life worth living?" were they heard at all in the
discussion? It may be that this, cut from the last report but one of
the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, a
long name for a weary task, has a suggestion of it: "In the depth of
winter the attention of the Association was called to a Protestant
family living in a garret in a miserable tenement in Cherry Street.
The family's condition was most deplorable. The man, his wife, and
three small children shivering in one room through the roof of which
the pitiless winds of winter whistled. The room was almost barren of
furniture; the parents slept on the floor, the elder children in boxes,
and the baby was swung in an old shawl attached to the rafters by cords
by way of a hammock. The father, a seaman, had been obliged to give up
that calling because he was in consumption, and was unable to provide
either bread or fire for his little ones."
Perhaps this may be put down as an exceptional case, but one that came
to my notice some months ago in a Seventh Ward tenement was typical
enough to escape that reproach. There were nine in the family: husband,
wife, an aged grandmother, and six children; honest, hard-working
Germans, scrupulously neat, but poor. All nine lived in two rooms, one
about ten feet square that served as parlor, bedroom, and eating-room,
the other a small hall-room made into a kitchen. The rent was seven
dollars and a half a month, more than a week's wages for the husband
and father, who was the only bread-winner in the family. That day the
mother had thrown herself out of the window, and was carried up from
the street dead. She was "discouraged," said some of the other women
from the tenement, who had come in to look after the children while
a messenger carried the news to the father at the shop. They went
stolidly about their task, although they were evidently not without
feeling for the dead woman. No doubt she was wrong in not taking life
philosophically, as did the four families a city missionary found
housekeeping in the four corners of one room. They got along well
enough together until one of the families took a boarder and made
trouble. Philosophy, according to my optimistic friend, naturally
inhabits the tenements. The people who live there come to look upon
death in a different way from the rest of us--do not take it as hard.
He has never found time to explain how the fact fits into his general
theory that life is not unbearable in the tenements. Unhappily for the
philosophy of the slums, it is too apt to be of the kind that readily
recognizes the saloon, always handy, as the refuge from every trouble,
and shapes its practice according to the discovery.