My friend asked me if I would like to go into any other tenements, but
I thought that if what I had seen was typical, I had seen enough in
that quarter. The truth is, I had not yet accustomed myself to going in
upon people in that way, though they seemed accustomed to being gone in
upon without any ceremony but the robust “Good-morning!” my companion
gave them by way of accounting for our presence, and I wanted a little
interval to prepare myself for further forays. The people seemed quite
ready to be questioned, and answered us as persons in authority. They
may have taken us for detectives, or agents of benevolent societies, or
journalists in search of copy. In any case, they had nothing to lose
and they might have something to gain; so they received us kindly and
made us as much at home among them as they knew how. It may have been
that in some instances they supposed that we were members of the Board
of Health and were their natural allies against their landlords.
I had not realized before how much this noble institution can befriend
the poor, so potently sustained as it is in the discharge of its duties
by the popular sentiment in a land where popular sentiment is so often
so weak. It has full power, in the public interest, to order repairs
and betterments necessary for the general health in any domicile, rich
or poor, in the city, and no man’s pleasure or profit may hinder it.
In cases of contagion or infection, it may isolate the neighborhood
or vacate the premises, or, in certain desperate conditions, destroy
them. As there are always pestilences of some sort preying upon the
poor (as if their poverty were not enough), my companion could point
out a typhus quarter, which the Board had shut up and which we must
not approach. Such minor plagues as smallpox, scarlet-fever, and
diphtheria are quickly discovered and made known, and the places that
they have infested are closed till they can be thoroughly purified.
Any tenant believing his premises to be in an unwholesome or dangerous
state may call in the Board, and from its decision the landlord has no
appeal. He must make the changes the Board ordains, and he must make
them at his own cost, though no doubt, when the tenant can pay, he
contrives somehow to make him pay in the end. The landlord, especially
if he battens on the poorer sort of tenants, is always in fear of the
Board, and the tenant is in love with it, for he knows that, in a
community otherwise delivered over to the pursuit of pelf or pleasure,
it stands his ready friend, whose mandate private interest obeys as it
obeys no other. It seems to have more honor than any other institution
among us, and, amid the most frightful corruption of every kind, to
remain incorruptible. Very likely the landlord may sometimes think
that it abuses its power, but the tenant never thinks so, and the
public seems always to agree with the tenant. The press, which is so
keen to scent out paternalism in municipal or national affairs, has
not yet perceived any odor of it in the Board of Health, and stands
its constant friend, though it embodies in the most distinctive form
the principle that, in a civilized community, the collective interest
is supreme. Even if such an extension of its powers were not in the
order of evolution, it would not be so illogical for the Board of
Health to command the abatement of poverty when the diseases that flow
from poverty cannot be otherwise abated. I should not like to prophesy
that it will ever do so, but stranger things have happened through the
necessity that knows no law, not even the law of demand and supply--the
demand of Moloch and the supply of Misery.