the most profitable!--which have a total population of no less
than 5,449 souls, or 187 to each house!

That part of Fifth Avenue which holds the chief part of the wealth and
fashion of New York has an extent of about two miles, or, counting both
sides of the street, four miles. These four miles of stately palaces
are occupied by four hundred families; while a single block of
tenement-houses, not two hundred yards out of Fifth Avenue, contains no
less than seven hundred families, or 3,500 souls! Seven such blocks, Mr.
Halliday pertinently remarks, would contain more people than the city of
Hartford, which covers an area of several miles square.

Such astounding facts as these the industrious Buckle of the year 3000,
intent upon a history of our American civilization, will quote to the
croakers of that day as samples of our nineteenth-century barbarism.

"But," some one may object, "if the houses were comfortably arranged,
and land was really scarce, after all, these people were not so badly
off."

The "tenement-house," which is now one of the "institutions" of New
York, stands usually upon a lot 25 by 100 feet, is from four to six
stories high, and is so divided internally as to contain four families
on each floor,--each family eating, drinking, sleeping, cooking,
washing, and fighting in a room eight feet by ten and a bed-room six
feet by ten; unless, indeed,--_which very frequently happens,_ says Mr.
Halliday,--the family renting these two rooms _takes in another family
to board,_ or _sub-lets_ one room to one _or even two_ other families!

But the modern improvements?

One of the largest and most recently built of the New York "barracks"
has apartments for 126 famines. It was built especially for this use.
It stands on a lot 50 by 250 feet, is entered at the sides from alleys
eight feet wide, and, by reason of the vicinity of another barrack of
equal height, the rooms are so darkened that on a cloudy day it is
impossible to read or sew in them without artificial light. It has not
one room which can in any way be thoroughly ventilated. The vaults and
sewers which are to carry off the filth of the 126 families have grated
openings in the alleys, and door-ways in the cellars, through which the
noisome and deadly miasmata penetrate and poison the dank air of the
house and the courts. The water-closets for the whole vast establishment
are a range of stalls without doors, and accessible not only from the
building, b