strata of existences are lifted up to a higher plane.
Meanwhile we must blame less harshly and work a little more
earnestly to better the human stock.

The environment of labor handicaps still further this
organic deficiency. In most of our great cities the homes of
the workingmen are shockingly unwholesome; unsunned, badly
drained, overcrowded. The tenements of New York are enough
alone to take the life out of labor. City factories often
are not much better. The quality of the food sold in the
poorer sections of our cities--meat, bread, milk, etc.--is
defectively nutritious, even where it is not positively
harmful. The sanitary conditions are thus against labor.

This could be largely reflected by the State and city
authorities, and ought to be rectified in simple justice to
society at large, which is now so heavily burdened by the
manifold evils bred under such conditions. Government guards
carefully the rights both of land and capital by an immense
amount of legislation and administration. Has not labor a
fair claim to an equal solicitude on the part of the State?
Health is the laborer's source of wealth, but it is by no
means so farefully looked after as are the resources of the
other two factors of production. It is only within the last
three years that in New York we have had a satisfactory
tenement-house law or a fair administration of any law
bearing on this evil. There ought to be the exercise of some
such large wisdom as led the city of Glasgow to spend
$7,000,000 in reconstructing three thousand of the worst
tenements of that city, with a consequent reduction of the
death rate from 54 per thousand to 29 per thousand, and with
a corresponding decrease in pauperism and crime.

To this end our municipal governments should be taken out
of party politics and made the corporation business that
they are in German cities.

We have in none of the States of our Union any such
legislation as that of the thorough system of factory laws
in England, and we ought to supply the lack promptly.
Whatever may be said as to interference on the part of
legislation with the rights of capital, the sufficient
answer is that the whole advance of society has been a
constant interference on the part of legislation with the
merel