and these conditions exist because the people are poor. They are often
poor _because they have no work_." At another point, commenting on
drinking among the poor, she writes: "Drinking among the women is
increasing. In the majority of cases we have studied, it has been the
effect of poverty, not the cause."

In the region between Houston Street and Canal Street, known now to be
the most thickly populated portion of the inhabited globe, every house
is a factory; that is, some form of manufacture is going on in every
room. The average family of five adds to itself from two to ten more,
often a sewing-machine to each person; and from six or seven in the
morning till far into the night work goes on,--usually the manufacture
of clothing. Here contagious diseases pass from one to another. Here
babies are born and babies die, the work never pausing save for death
and hardly for that. In one of these homes Dr. Daniel found a family of
five making cigars, the mother included. "Two of the children were ill
of diphtheria. Both parents attended to these children; they would
syringe the nose of each child, and without washing their hands return
to their cigars. We have repeatedly observed the same thing when the
work was manufacturing clothing and undergarments to be bought as well
by the rich as by the poor. Hand-sewed shoes, made for a fashionable
Broadway shoe-store, were sewed at home by a man in whose family were
three children sick with scarlet-fever. And such instances are common.
Only death or lack of work closes tenement-house manufactories ... When
we consider that stopping this work means no food and no roof over their
heads, the fact that the disease may be carried by their work cannot be
expected to impress the people."

Farther on in the report, she adds: "The people can neither be moral nor
healthy until they have decent homes." Yet the present wage-rate makes
decent homes impossible; and though Brooklyn and Boston have a few model
tenement-houses, New York has none, the experiment of making over in
part a few old ones hardly counting save in intention. Into these homes
respectable, ambitious, hard-working girls and women are compelled to
go. That they live decent lives speaks worlds for the intrinsic goodness
and purity of nature which in the midst of conditions intolerable to
every sense still preserves these characteristics. That they must live
in such surroundings is one of the deepest disgraces of civilization.