tenement for over three years, according to their
own and the housekeeper's statements. There had been four. One was then in
the hospital, but not because of any ill effect the cellar had had upon
him. He had been run over in the street and was making the most of his
vacation, charging it up to the owner of the wagon, whom he was getting
ready to sue for breaking his leg. Up-stairs, especially in the rear
tenement, I found the scene from the cellar repeated with variations. In
one room a family of seven, including the oldest daughter, a young woman
of eighteen, and her brother, a year older than she, slept in a common bed
made on the floor of the kitchen, and manifested scarcely any concern at
our appearance. A complaint to the Board of Health resulted in an
overhauling that showed the tenement to be unusually bad even for that bad
spot; but when we came to look up its record, from the standpoint of the
vital statistics, we discovered that not only had there not been a single
death in the house during the whole year, but on the third floor lived a
woman over a hundred years old, who had been there a long time. I was
never more surprised in my life, and while we laughed at it, I confess it
came nearer to upsetting my faith in the value of statistics than anything
I had seen till then. And yet I had met with similar experiences, if not
quite so striking, often enough to convince me that poverty and want beget
their own power to resist the evil influences of their worst surroundings.
I was at a loss how to put this plainly to the good people who often asked
wonderingly why the children of the poor one saw in the street seemed
generally such a thriving lot, until a slip of Mrs. Partington's
discriminating tongue did it for me: "Manured to the soil." That is it. In
so far as it does not merely seem so--one does not see the sick and
suffering--that puts it right.

[Illustration: "SLEPT IN THAT CELLAR FOUR YEARS."]

Whatever the effect upon the physical health of the children, it cannot be
otherwise, of course, than that such conditions should corrupt their
morals. I have the authority of a distinguished rabbi, whose field and
daily walk are among the poorest of his people, to support me in the
statement that the moral tone of the young girls is distinctly lower than
it was. The entire absence of privacy in their homes and the foul contact
of the sweaters' shops, where men and women work side by side from morning
till nig