in the tenement-house region, a
breeding centre of intemperance, pestilence, crime, and future mobs,
where wretched life is crushed to deeper wretchedness by the avaricious
exaction of unfeeling landlords[10] worse than those against whom the
Irish rebel. Is not the splendor of such a city like the hectic flush on
the consumptive's cheek? The statistics of the past year reveal the
startling fact that New York is a decaying city; that its population has
no natural growth, but had 853 more deaths than births.

[10] Fifteen to forty per cent. is the usual profit exacted on
tenement-house property, according to witnesses before a
Senate Committee,--forty per cent. being common. Is not
this the plunder of poverty by wealth? Has Ireland anything
approaching this or resembling the horrid conditions in New
York? "All previous accounts and descriptions" (says
Ballington Booth) "became obliterated from my memory by the
surprise and horror I experienced when passing through some
of the foul haunts and vicious hotbeds which make up the
labyrinth of this modern Sodom." "How powerless" (said Mr.
Booth) "are lips to describe or pens to write scenes which
baffle description, and which no ink is black enough to
show in their true colors."

The desire for ostentation as one of the great aims of life is inwoven
into the whole fabric of society to the exclusion of nobler motives, for
ostentation is death to benevolence. How many bankruptcies, how many
defalcations, and frauds, how many absconding criminals, how many
struggles ending in broken-down constitutions, how many social wrecks
and embittered lives are due to its seductive influence, because the
Church and the moral sentiment of society have not taken a stand against
it, and education has never checked it, for it runs riot at the
universities patronized by the wealthy.

New York has been said to spend five millions annually on flowers, which
is far more a matter of ostentation than of taste, for as a rule
"whatever is most costly is most fashionable." Nor is the cost the only
evil, for the costly dinners and parties of the ostentatious are not
only characterized by an absence of serious and elevated sentiment, but
by intellectual poverty and frivolous chatter. To waste $5,000 for an
evening's lavish display of flowers to a thoughtless and crowded throng,
almost within h