ith
perhaps one-third the population of London, yet it presents varieties of
life among the "masses" quite as picturesque, and elements of population
even more dangerous. The throng of different nationalities in the
American city gives a peculiarly variegated air to the life beneath the
surface, and the enormous over-crowding in portions of the poor quarters
intensifies the evils, peculiar to large towns, to a degree seen only in
a few districts in such cities as London and Liverpool.

The _mass_ of poverty and wretchedness is, of course, far greater in the
English capital. There are classes with inherited pauperism and crime
more deeply stamped in them, in London or Glasgow, than we ever behold
in New York; but certain small districts can be found in our metropolis
with the unhappy fame of containing more human beings packed to the
square yard, and stained with more acts of blood and riot, within a
given period, than is true of any other equal space of earth in the
civilized world.

There are houses, well known to sanitary boards and the police, where
Fever has taken a perennial lease, and will obey no legal summons to
quit; where Cholera--if a single germ-seed of it float anywhere in
American atmosphere--at once ripens a black harvest; where Murder has
stained every floor of its gloomy stories, and Vice skulks or riots from
one year's end to the other. Such houses are never reformed. The only
hope for them is in the march of street improvements, which will utterly
sweep them away.

It is often urged that the breaking-up of these "dens" and "fever-nests"
only scatters the pestilence and moral disease, but does not put an end
to them.

The objection is more apparent than real. The abolishing of one of these
centres of crime and poverty is somewhat like withdrawing the virus from
one diseased limb and diffusing it through an otherwise healthy body. It
seems to lose its intensity. The diffusion weakens. Above all, it is
less likely to become hereditary.

One of the remarkable and hopeful things about New York, to a close
observer of its "dangerous classes," is, as I shall show in a future
chapter, that they do not tend to become fixed and inherited, as in
European cities.

But, though the crime and pauperism of New York are not so deeply
stamped in the blood of the population, they are even more dangerous.
The intensity of the American temperament is felt in every fibre of
these children of poverty and vice. Their