all
the new tenement-houses would be changed. But to attain this desirable
end, the model houses must first pay a profit, and a fair one. So long
as they do not succeed in this, they are a failure, however benevolent
their object and comfortable their arrangements. In this point of view,
the "Waterloo Houses," in London, are a success, and do undoubtedly
influence the mode of building and management of private
tenement-houses; in this, also, the "Peabody Houses" are not a success,
and will have no permanent influence.

The Model Houses in London for lodging single men have, as the writer
has witnessed, changed and elevated the whole class of similar private
lodging-houses.

The experiment ought to be tried here, on a merely business basis, by
some of our wealthy men. The evil of crowded tenement-houses might be
immensely alleviated by such a remedy.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CAUSES OF CRIME.

INTEMPERANCE.

The power of the appetite for alcoholic stimulus is something amazing. A
laboring-man feels it especially on account of the drag on his nervous
system of steady and monotonous labor, and because of the few mental
stimuli which he enjoys. He returns to his tenement-house after a hard
day's work, "dragged out" and craving excitement; his rooms are
disagreeable; perhaps his wife cross, or slatternly, and his children
noisy; he has an intense desire for something which can take him out of
all this, and cause his dull surroundings and his fatigue to be
forgotten. Alcohol does this; moreover, he can bear alcohol and tobacco,
to retard the waste of muscle, as the sedentary man cannot. In a few
steps, he can find jolly companions, a lighted and warmed room, a
newspaper, and, above all, a draught which, for the moment, can change
poverty to riches, and drive care and labor and the thought of all his
burdens and annoyances far away.

[Illustration: THE FORTUNES OF A STREET WAIF. (Third Stage.)]

The liquor-shop is his picture-gallery, club, reading-room, and social
_salon,_ at once. His glass is the magic transmuter of care to
cheerfulness, of penury to plenty, of a low, ignorant, worried life, to
an existence for the moment buoyant, contented, and hopeful. Alas that
the magician who thus, for the instant, transforms him with her rod,
soon returns him to his low estate, with ten thousand curses haunting
him! The one thus touched by the