d great chimneys gave currents of pure air, while simple food kept
blood pure and gave small chance for unruly impulses to govern. But once
with us demoralization began, and the tenement-house guaranteed sure
corruption for every tenant. Even for the most decent there was small
escape. To the children born in these quarters every inmost fact of
human life was from the beginning a familiar story. Overcrowding, the
impossibility of slightest privacy, the constant contact with the
grossest side of life, soon deaden any susceptibility and destroy every
gleam of modesty or decency. In the lowest order of all rules an
absolute shamelessness which conceals itself in the grade above, yet has
no less firm hold of those who have come up in such conditions.

There are many exceptions, many well-fought battles against their power,
but our concern at present is not with these but with facts as they
stand recorded. Physician after physician has given in her testimony and
one and all agree in the statement that open prostitution is for many
merely the final step,--a mere setting the seal to the story of ruin and
licentiousness that has always existed. The women who adopt this mode of
life because of want of work or low wages are the smallest of
minorities. The illegitimate children for whom the city must care are
not from this source. Often the mother is a mere child who has been
deceived and outraged, but far more often she has entered a family
prepared to meet any advances, and often directly the tempter.

It is this state of things which makes many mothers say: "My girl shall
never run such risks. I'll keep her from them as long as I can;" and
unsavory as the details will seem, their knowledge is an essential
factor in the problem. The tenement-house stands to-day not only as the
breeder of disease and physical degeneration for every inmate, but as
equally potent in social demoralization for the class who ignore its
existence. Out of these houses come hundreds upon hundreds of our
domestic servants, whose influence is upon our children at the most
impressible age, and who bring inherited and acquired foulness into our
homes and lives. And if such make but the smallest proportion of those
who serve, they are none the less powerful and most formidable agents in
that blunting of moral perception which is a more and more apparent fact
in the life of the day. The records from which such knowledge is gleaned
are not accessible to the gen