THE HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF.
The importance of environment is at last admitted as a factor in
character-building. That light and air are indispensable to cleanliness,
and physical cleanliness to health, and health to morals, is the gospel
that the evils of the tenements have forced the philanthropists to declare
until the thinking public is convinced of its truth.
There are tenement houses that have reputations as positive as individuals.
Thoughtful, intelligent wives of working-men would not, could not be
persuaded to move into them because of their reputations. Often the evils
of these tenements are justly attributed to the housekeepers. Housekeepers
of tenements are women who pay the whole or a part of their rent by
overseeing the house; attending to the cleaning, collecting the rents,
letting the rooms, adjusting differences between tenants--"a go-between"
between the agent or the owner and the tenants. The owner or agent
employing these women upholds their decisions when differences between the
tenants and housekeepers arise. This clothes them with great authority,
and often enables them to do great injustice. They are feared usually.
Families will endure restrictions of liberties, every deprivation of their
rights, because protest would mean eviction or discomforts that would
compel them to move.
Under some agents and owners these housekeepers have absolute control of
the property. They frequently make and enforce rules that utterly ignore
the rights of tenants. This rule is often as absolute as though they were
the owners of the house. Strange as it may seem, this class of housekeepers
usually make the property under their control pay; they usually keep up the
character of the houses under their control because they have standards and
compel those about them to live up to them.
[Illustration: A REMNANT OF THE PAST.]
On an East Side street a few blocks from the East River are four 27-foot
front houses of the English-basement type. The plan of these houses
indicates that they were designed as residences for people of ample means.
The halls are broad, the stairways wide, ascending in recesses on the first
floor that leaves the entrance halls clear from front to rear doorways. The
yards of these four houses, wide and deep, are paved with broad flagging
stones, such as are used on the sidewalks. The fences are kept in good
order and well painted. Not a child living in these four houses dares to
play in those yards. The housekeeper--one woman has charge of the four
houses--would order them out. If the children did not leave at once,
complaint would be made to the mothers; and if they did not uphold the
housekeeper and insist that the children play in the street, the mothers
who failed would have to move. Every mother-tenant knows this well. A
mother of three children who had lived in these houses all her married
life, when asked why the children could not play in the yard, where she
could watch them, replied: "Why, if the children played in the yard they
would make a lot of work for the housekeeper. She would not stand it." This
mother's tone indicated that she thought the housekeeper was right. The
youngest of the three children in another family living in these houses was
ill all winter. When convalescent, the doctor ordered him to be kept out of
doors as much as possible. The mother had all the work to do for five in
family, and had to devise some means of keeping the child out that would
not interfere with her work. She arranged the fire-escape outside of the
window, putting pillows and toys out there. The little fellow climbed over
the rail and struck a stone beneath, breaking his arms.
"Why did you not put him in the yard, where you could watch him, and where
he could run about?"
"Oh! the housekeeper would be so angry; I wouldn't dare."
"Must you keep the children out of the yard?"
"Yes; they would make an awful lot of work for the housekeeper."
Investigation proved that the owner of this property supported the
housekeeper in depriving even the babies of the use of these yards. A
mother could not roll a baby carriage around the yards, because her older
children, if she had any, would be sure to go into the yards to see her.
The rents for four rooms, two absolutely dark, ventilated through the dark
and unventilated halls by a window eighteen inches square, were $22, $20
and $18 per month, respectively, for each floor. The streets in front are
overcrowded, dirty; when the trucks were in the streets, two were always
standing in front of these houses. Push-carts now replace the trucks.
The people stay in these houses year after year. A bill never appears on
them. The arbitrary restriction as to the use of the yard is not counted
against the property, because it is so clean, kept in such good repair, and
the character of the people scrutinized before they are accepted as
tenants. It is generally understood that the renting of furnished rooms is
not approved. The housekeeper finds a tenant who rents rooms objectionable.
In a neighborhood where every house shows year after year a loss of
character, people poorer and more ignorant becoming tenants, these four
houses retain the appearance of comfort and respectability. Among the
tenants there is but little intimacy; they appear to have little in common.
The women are never heard in the halls, nor do they loiter about the
doorways. The men are all skilled workmen, earning good wages--clerks on
small salaries, or in city departments, all natives of New York. The wives
were all wage-earners before they were married. They dress well; most of
them are fairly good housekeepers. All buy their children's clothes ready
made; two make their own dresses. For their children they are ambitious,
and expect to keep them in school until they are sixteen. This the children
defeat. The boys get places during the summer vacations in their fourteenth
year, refusing to go back to school. The girls are contented until
fourteen, and then they grow restless, becoming wage-earners; all that they
earn is spent for their clothes. The wages of the father may no more than
meet the expenses of the family, but this is not considered. Clothes are
the essentials. A man having a salary of $1,400, living in one of these
houses, had to go in debt the first week of a serious illness of his wife.
He did not have a dollar in advance to meet emergencies. He was a proud,
indulgent, tender husband and father.
This type of house and this class of tenants are disappearing from the East
Side. The remnant of this class who remain are held by political
affiliations or family ties. The men enjoy the sense of power that comes
from this connection, and realize fully that to leave the district would
mean a loss of social prestige, or, if minor politicians, a loosening of
their hold on the people to whom they represent political power. Many of
this class remain in the section because they hold positions in the city
departments in return for active service in the interest of the political
machines.
Not far away from these tenements is another in which are sixteen families.
The rents in this house range from $5 to $9.50 per month for two to three
rooms. The house is dirty, neglected; violations of the sanitary laws are
evident from the front door to the roof, on which tenants occupying the
front rooms must dry their clothes. The water is in the dark halls; in
winter, for days at a time, the pipes, both water and drain, are frozen and
burst; yet the tenants stay year after year. One woman, the mother of four
children, was born, married, her four children were born, and her husband,
mother and father died in this house. She has never moved, except across
the hall, up and downstairs, as she has been able to pay more or has been
forced to reduce her rent. The women in this house know almost nothing of
housekeeping. The men are employed only about half the time. The number of
children in the house averages three to each family. It is a New England
hamlet under one roof in this particular. If there is sickness in any
family, it is the concern of every tenant; if a man is out of work, it is a
community misfortune, and to be shared. A new hat for man or woman is the
cause of rejoicing, for it is the badge of respectability for any in the
house who may need it in an emergency. The whole household, for such it
seems to be, are poor, very poor; thriftless, unambitious; the men somewhat
given to drink to excess; yet the spirit of neighborliness shames
criticism. A woman in this house ill four months was nursed by her
neighbors night and day. Her house and children were cared for, food
provided when necessary. Comment on their loyalty and devotion was met with
the response: "God knows how soon she may be doing it for one of us." Yet
when that woman, whom most of them had known all her life, gave evidence of
pregnancy a few months after her husband's death, not a woman crossed her
doorsill until the birth of twin babies within the period of time redeemed
her character. Whether from remorse or love, ample return for this cruelty
has been made many times.
In the two-room apartments in this house there is one closet, with shelves
about six inches wide. This is in the one room that serves as living-room,
kitchen, dining-room--a room less than eight feet wide. The bedroom is
perfectly dark, ventilated by a square window into perfectly dark,
unventilated halls. A full-sized bed leaves the width of the door between
it and the wall. The three-room apartments have outside windows--five to
the three rooms. There is a closet in the kitchen and one in the large
room. People talk of poverty, but few people know what it is. A woman who
had moved into the three-room apartment had hung all the clothing for five
in family in the one bedroom on four nails. In reply to a protest, she said
patiently and quietly: "There are no hooks in the closet in the front room,
and I hadn't a penny to buy any." Ten cents provided that closet with
hooks. A comment was made on the keeping of the washtub under the kitchen
table. "Why do you not have the tub carried to the cellar?" An expression
of self-pity passed over the woman's face as she explained that the tub
would have to be carried down three flights of stairs, out on the street,
around the corner, down the cellar stairs, and then to her coal cellar at
the extreme end of the cellar.
The house stands on a corner, the entrance from the street at the extreme
end of the west wall. The cellar door was formerly close to the entrance
door, but the landlord built in the back end of the cellar an oven when a
baker hired the store on the first floor. A cellar door was then opened at
the farthest part of the front, or south wall, one hundred and twenty-five
feet from the entrance door of the house. Is it surprising that coal is
bought by the pail by all the tenants? That tubs are kept anywhere in their
rooms where there is space?
Shiftlessness, thriftless uncleanliness marks even the sidewalk about this
house. The dirt inside or out troubles nobody. Children will spill half the
contents of the garbage pail they are carrying to the cans in the tiny
yard, in halls and on the stairway. It is kicked out of the way without
comment. Dogs or cats, and ofttimes both, are members of the families who
live under this roof. The unsanitary conditions of the closets in the yard
arouse pity for the tenants on the first floor; but no tenant thinks of
complaining to either the housekeeper or the authorities. It would be
useless, and would get them into trouble. The present owner is willing to
kalsomine the bedrooms and halls each spring, but the tenants object
because it makes a lot of work.
In August, two years ago, the writer was going up the first flight of
stairs in this house, when a baby voice was heard pleading: "Pease tum
fas'er; oh, pease tum fas'er; I 'ant to do p'ay; I 'ant to doe on steet;
pease tum fas'er." On the third floor a tiny boy stood in front of the sink
talking to the faucet, from which a tiny stream was flowing into a little
tin pail. An infant's voice from one of the rooms told the story. The
mother needed water and could not leave the baby. Perhaps this was the tiny
nurse of mother and baby, big enough to call a neighbor to do what he could
not do.
When it is remembered that this stream of water from the faucet represented
the water supply for four families, the difficulties of cleanliness under
those conditions may be slightly appreciated. In spite of the dirt, the
darkness, the unsanitary conditions of this house, the thriftlessness and
ignorance of the tenants, there is a spirit of neighborliness in it that
puts the critical to blush. Without a doubt the housekeeper, who is a
shrewd woman, fosters this spirit of neighborliness. She smiles as she
says: "They gets so used to each other they hates to be separated." Neither
house nor tenants seem to go below the level established twelve years ago.
There is a housekeeper who does mission work of which the world takes no
note. She is the woman who in the true sense is an altruist. By her force
of character, her hatred of inefficiency, her love of order, she compels
the women who become tenants who do not know how to keep house to learn
how.
The writer knows intimately such a housekeeper. She had charge of a
four-story tenement on the lower East Side. The house was of the type known
as "double decker." There were four apartments on each floor; the front
consisting of a kitchen, living-room and two bedrooms; the back, of one
room and two bedrooms. Small windows near the ceiling in kitchen and
bedrooms opened on a narrow space between this and the next house, which
was an old-fashioned residence. A similar opening in that house enabled the
neighbors to look into each other's rooms. Water and refuse were thrown
into this space between the two houses, and sometimes into the rooms of
neighbors unintentionally. There was war, bitter war, because of this; for
the large tenement was occupied by a part of the remnant having social
standards left on the lower East Side.
There was water in all the kitchens of the large tenement. The halls were
absolutely dark, but were free from the nuisances of hallways having sinks.
Stairs and halls were covered with light oilcloth, the stairs having brass
treads on the edge. Everything was kept as clean as soap, water and
muscular strength could keep it.
The first visit was made to this house long before Colonel Waring had shown
what clean streets would do in the tenement-house districts. On the street
curb in front of the door stood three ash barrels filled within three
inches of the top, carefully covered with newspapers tucked in around the
edge of the contents. This indicates the standards of this housekeeper. She
hated dirt and disorder. She could not be happy where it was. She forced by
tact, coercion, persuasion, any and every means, her way to the heart and
home of every ignorant housekeeper who came under that roof. She taught
cooking by sending cake, bread, soup she had made to the tenants, and
arousing the desire in them to learn how to make that particular dish. She
instituted an exchange of skill among the tenants. The woman who could make
a dress and not a hat exchanged skill with the one who had been a milliner.
The woman who made bread and failed with cake exchanged skill with the
cakemaker. They even took turns in going to the theatre, the neighbor
staying home and taking care of the children.
The property was more valuable every year; no bill appeared at the door. It
stood apart from its neighbors for years. This housekeeper was compelled to
give up her responsibility and left the house, as she wisely said: "No one
would manage it in my way. I could not get on in peace." Six months after
every tenant had moved but the liquor dealer; and even his bar-room had
sunk to a lower level. A building in which many homes might be maintained
is now merely a place of shelter. People move in and out; no relations are
established; there is nothing to hold the tenant here above any other
house. The owner has sold the property, hating its present character.
Again, tenants will be the victims of vindictive housekeepers, who for any
and no reason will begin a system of petty persecutions to compel a tenant
to move. Then there is the gossiping housekeeper, who keeps the tenants at
war. It is no secret that the method of rent collecting of some
housekeepers holds tenants year after year. They will take the rent in the
smallest sums, daily or weekly. By the end of the month they will usually
have the full amount collected. The houses where this system prevails are
the most objectionable. The tenants for this leniency endure positive
evils. The important thing is a place of shelter for the family. Work is
uncertain, or long periods of idleness has made the payment of rent
impossible for a period. The housekeeper understands and becomes
responsible for keeping the tenant until the rent is paid. In return the
tenants endure neglect of duty on the part of the housekeeper. Silence is
their expression of gratitude. No repairs are made, for none are demanded.
The house sinks lower and lower; anybody can move in on the payment of part
of a month's rent. The vacant rooms are dirty--give visible evidence of the
presence of vermin; but the family evicted with only half a month's rent in
hand cannot afford to be critical. This is the house that makes the slum.
Two housekeepers of tenements were discussing owners and tenants before the
writer. One was rigid, keeping the house astonishingly clean, with rooms
rarely vacant; the other, always in trouble with the tenants, always having
some one to evict, threw the blame for her troubles on the tenants. The
first one listened, finally saying slowly: "No, you are the one. You get
cross and abuse the children. You make pets of some children and some
mothers, and the others see it and get mad. Then there is a fight. To keep
a house you must treat everybody the same. You must make good rules; you
must do your part and make every tenant do her part. I've had two of the
tenants you put out of your house five years. They are good tenants; watch
yourself."
[Illustration: A TYPE OF THE PRESENT.]
There are landlords who care for nothing but the income from their
property. Any kind of tenant who will pay rent is acceptable. Any
housekeeper who collects the specified amount may hold control without
question. The housekeeper may have standards, but these are swept aside by
the exactions of the landlord. The rents in such houses are usually high,
because there is such a percentage of loss in rents. This house also
contributes to the creation of the slum.
The careless and apparently malicious destruction of property by tenants is
not appreciated by those who touch this question of tenement houses
superficially. No means has yet been found to make the tenement-house
population understand that the abuse of property is a factor in their rent
problem. Within a year the writer was walking with a group of women, two of
whom were housekeepers in tenement houses. This question of tenants was
being discussed freely by the women who were tenants as well as the
housekeepers. It was interesting to find that all agreed that one family
could change the character of a tenement house for the worst, but one
family could not improve its character. The reason was that the family
above the tenement came only to reduce their rent during a hard time, while
the family with evil tendencies stayed until they were put out, to go into
a cheaper tenement and lower that. They agreed that where housekeeper and
tenant got on well together both hated a change. The two things that
dragged down the character of a tenement was beer-drinking and destructive
children--children allowed to "run wild." These women insisted that there
never would be quarrels in tenement houses were it not for these two
causes. A woman who drank beer would invite her new neighbors to drink.
They would treat in return, and the house would show it at once. The women
who drink beer in this fashion grow careless of their persons and their
homes; they get rid of their children, who soon learn to enjoy the freedom
from control. The children destroy the property first in play, through
carelessness, and later grow malicious.
If a housekeeper is sharp and shrewd, these women tenants claimed that she
could at any time get rid of an objectionable tenant; but the housekeepers
held that if the owner did not care for anything but rents, the
housekeeper was often compelled to let in and keep in objectionable
tenants. They admitted, one and all, that houses fairly indicated the
character of the people who would live in them, and that rents regulated
the class of tenants to a very great degree. They admitted that at times
one could find tenants who had lived for many years in one house where
conditions had changed for the worst. But it was unusual. People now
selected houses where those of their own faith, and, if foreign, those of
their own nationality, at least predominated. That this tendency was seen
more and more every year. This group of women were among the remnant of
Christians left on the lower East Side. All had been born there of Irish
parentage. They lived in the houses bordering on the edge of the East
River--old houses on the plan of the first tenements erected in New York,
or in houses designed for one family and now holding four to eight. Two of
them lived in houses built in a row erected eighty-three years ago. They
were two-story, dormer windows and basement frame houses, built without an
area, the door to the basements opening like a cellar door on the street.
These basements were occupied by a family each. Fourteen of these houses
are still standing. The people in this section live a life entirely their
own. They have been crowded out, the more prosperous, by the Hebrews,
while the remnant find themselves hemmed in by them.
These people live in the confines of a Roman Catholic parish that twenty
years ago contained nearly eleven thousand souls of that faith. Three years
ago the priest in charge estimated his parish at less than four thousand,
and that four thousand remained because they were too poor to get away, he
declared.
The Hebrews, as tenants will, on the same block show many social grades,
many degrees of poverty and prosperity, many stages of development in
American civilization. There is a sense of feeling of brotherhood that
other people lack. The houses will range from the most uncleanly, ill-kept,
to the new tenement with ornate entrance and modern improvements. The most
modern will, on entering, be found with walls marked and broken when the
wood-work is new. No one seems troubled by this destruction. The
housekeeper does not struggle, for it is expected and charged for in the
rent. Plumbing is of the simplest, for it is expected to present the
largest percentage of loss in the administration of the property. One of
the most elaborate of the new tenements erected on the lower East Side was
visited three months after it was occupied. Every hallway from top to
bottom of the house had broken plaster and was marked by pencil and crayon.
The plumber was then a daily visitor. This house a year afterward bore on
the interior evidences that years of hard usage might have brought. The
housekeeper collected rents and attended to the garbage. She was utterly
indifferent to the appearance of the house, which, intended for prosperous
families, was a nest of sweat-shops, where even children of six and seven
were employed. The rents had been collected; that was the owner's only
requirement.
The West Side is congested, because manufacture and storehouses are
displacing the houses. Rents are high, and the houses for the most part old
residences occupied by several families. The people, generally, are
Americans. They are deeply attached to this old section, because it is
their birthplace; and for many of them an even deeper attachment prevails,
for this section was the birthplace of parents. The houses often are found
to have lifelong friends, often relatives, as tenants. The tenants keep the
halls and stairways clean in turn, and the houses generally are well kept
up. Here one tenant is allowed a rebate on rent for renting rooms,
collecting the rent, caring for the sidewalk and stoop, the garbage and
ash-cans. The majority of the people in this section are Protestants. The
Protestant churches are well maintained. The Trinity Corporation supports
kindergartens, cooking and sewing schools. The Judson Memorial is a very
attractive gymnasium, that brings children from as far west as the North
River. The Methodist Church holds many who in no other section could find
the same equality and freedom. The vocabulary of the people through this
section shows the effect of the newer activities in the modern churches;
the effect of the enlarging interests of the children in art and nature
through the public school education.
While the people are living on small incomes, often on uncertain incomes,
life is lived at a much higher level than on the East Side. Children are
not so precocious in evil knowledge. This difference is due largely to the
fact that the houses contain three and four families at the most; that the
apartment houses in the section are beyond the reach of any but the skilled
working man. He holds his own at high rental in the house that shelters but
three other families like his own. His neighbors are people of like
ambitions as his own, and demand what he demands.
[Illustration: A CORNER IN A WORKINGMAN'S HOME.]
The housekeepers in this section differ essentially in their relation to
the tenants from those of the more heterogeneous population of the East
Side of the city. One resemblance is recognized--the effect of the
character of the housekeeper. Here, as on the East Side, to a very large
degree, the comfort, health, peace and good-will of the tenants in every
house depends on the character and the spirit of the woman who controls the
property for the landlord.
The law of natural selection holds good. The housekeeper holds the tenants
who are satisfied with the conditions she creates. They, especially the
children, develop in habits of cleanliness, in care of property, in respect
for the rights of others, as the rules of the house enforced by the
housekeeper compel. It is in her power to get rid of those who do not
accept her dictates, let them be what they may--just or unjust. The
housekeeper will make her presence felt. If she violates the law in the
disposal of garbage outside of the house, tenants will violate the law she
makes for them in the care and disposal of garbage inside the house. If she
is compelled to obey the law, she will compel tenants to obey the law. It
is this that makes the morale of the Department of Street Cleaning so
important. If the part of the house which in renting tenants agree to keep
clean is not kept clean, the observer will discover that the housekeeper
does not keep her part of the agreement in keeping the entrance clean.
A large factor in the tenement house for character building or destroying
is the housekeeper who has charge of it. Where she is well paid she makes
the property valuable. She cares for it, for the character of the tenants.
Tenants remain in the house because of the advantages her offices control
for the poor man and his wife anxious to provide for their children's best
welfare. Property under this type of woman resists decay. She holds it in
spite of the decay about it. The characterless, slovenly, indifferent
housekeeper is a factor in destroying property, because of the destructive
character of the tenants who will tolerate her and her methods.
The house that is the property of the man with "a pull" is an obstruction
to civilization almost impossible to overcome. By connivance the law is
inoperative. If pushed, such an owner can easily rid himself of the tenants
who attempt, or have attempted for them, efforts to compel the owners to
repair the property. A mill owner on the water front on the lower East Side
owned three three-story and basement houses adjoining the mill property.
They had been built for one family each. The basements were altered into
stores, and the floors above altered at the least cost to accommodate one
or two families. This meant two inside bedrooms absolutely without
ventilation. The tenants of this property and all in the neighborhood were
tormented by the smoke and gas from the chimney of the mill. When the wind
blew directly toward the houses, windows were kept closed for hours in the
warmest weather. All the tenants dried their clothes on pulley lines.
Frequently the soot made the clothes unwearable, and they had to be washed
the second time. Ten years of effort have failed to compel the building of
the chimney of that mill to the legal height.
The houses the mill owner owned were in a disgraceful condition. The
closets in the yards had no flow of water. The engineer of the mill was
required to carry a hose from the mill over the fences to the closets to
flush them. Sometimes he forgot to turn the water off, and the yards were
flooded and made disgusting. Sometimes he forgot for days at a time to
flush the closets, when the conditions were even worse. Only people who
were helpless or hopeless would endure such conditions. One of the workers
of the College Settlement discovered the conditions in these houses. She
took immediate steps to compel the necessary improvements. The owner
discovered that the wife and children of one of the tenants went to clubs
at the Settlement, and he ordered that family to move. Before the mother
moved her education had begun, and she imparted to her neighbors the
information that the conditions were unlawful and could be changed if they
would fight for it. The man exacted his rent on the first of the month; he
was hard and unyielding; the tenants continued the warfare until he had
evicted every one who spoke English and filled his houses with foreigners.
One of the stores is used for storing and sorting rags and paper; next door
is a meat shop. The fight was given up. The owner had "a pull," and the law
is defied to this day on that property.
All the land on the river front in this neighborhood for blocks is made
land, filled in by the city refuse, on which houses were built years ago.
This kind of property extends back from the North River for three, and at
one point four, blocks. In some of the houses near the river the high tides
of spring and fall rise in the cellars. The College Settlement workers who
visited families in one of these houses had been distressed by the amount
of illness in it. Malaria had attacked every family. Spring and fall wages
were lost at times by as many as three wage-earners in one family for two
and three days each week. In addition to loss of wages, there was the
expense of medicine and doctors. At last came the urgent request that a
worker should call on a girl of sixteen who was dying of consumption on the
first floor. This consisted of four rooms, two being inside bedrooms, each
of which would hold a three-quarter bed and a chair between the bed and the
wall. One was absolutely unventilated, except through the doors. It was, in
fact, a passageway between the front and rear rooms. This plan is the usual
plan in houses altered from residences for one family to a tenement house.
The door of the other bedroom, which opened into the large room, was closed
at night because the large room was used as a bedroom by the male members
of the family and one lodger. The girl of sixteen had slept with two others
in that room for eight years. The floors of the four rooms were covered
with carpets. The odor was sickening. The visitor asked the tenant who
brought her to the sick girl what caused the odor perceptible in the hall,
with front and rear windows always open, unbearable in the rooms where
doors and windows were closed.
"Oh, that! The water has been in the cellar now for two or three weeks. The
tides are high now." A visit to the cellar showed the water at the height
of the second step of the cellar stairs; also a sewer pipe that had burst.
Visits were made to the proper city department once a week for eleven
weeks. The clerk, on the last visit, evidently intending to be facetious,
said: "Say, what's the matter with those people taking baths in that
cellar? They ain't got no bathtubs."
The owner of the property had "pull" enough to escape even an investigation
by the department. It was years before the cellar of that house was
concreted and the necessary connections of pipes and sewers made. It was
done when the property had changed hands and a man comparatively poor and
wholly free from political affiliations became the owner.
The people of this whole region are the victims of political corruption.
Some of them have more fear of offending a political light, let his glimmer
be ever so small, than of offending against even God's law. They could be
turned out of house and home, deprived of the means of earning a living, by
men who openly defy the law, and who become heroes to the growing boys and
girls for no reason but because of their power to use and defy the law.
The moral natures of the men and the women who grow up under this influence
are dwarfed and warped until it is impossible for them to have distinct
conceptions of right and wrong. The education they receive does not reveal
the relations of ethics to life; the struggle for existence dulls the mind;
while the depleted physical conditions caused by bad air, mal-nutrition and
ignorance of real values reduce moral resistance almost to zero. Enforce
the tenement-house laws, and the moral strength of the people of New York
will rise to higher levels of moral resistance. Not poverty, but the burden
imposed by political corruption, is the blight of home life in the
tenement-house sections of New York.