ject. Warsaw was their old home. They kept a little store there, and
were young and happy. Oh, it was a fine city, with parks and squares,
and bridges over the beautiful river,--and grass and flowers and birds
and soldiers, put in the girl breathlessly. She remembered. But the
children kept coming, and they went across the sea to give them a better
chance. Father made fifteen dollars a week, much money; but there were
long seasons when there was no work. She, the mother, was never very
well here,--she hadn't any strength; and the baby! She glanced at his
grave white face, and took him in her arms. The picture of the two, and
of the pale-faced girl longing back to the fields and the sunlight, in
their prison of gloom and gray walls, haunts me yet. I have not had the
courage to go back since. I recalled the report of an English army
surgeon, which I read years ago, on the many more soldiers that
died--were killed would be more correct--in barracks into which the sun
never shone than in those that were open to the light. They have yet two
months to the sun in Stanton Street.

The capmaker's case is the case of the nineteenth century of
civilization against the metropolis of America. The home, the family,
are the rallying points of civilization. The greatness of a city is to
be measured, not by its balance sheets of exports and imports, not by
its fleet of merchantmen, or by its miles of paved streets, nor even by
its colleges, its art museums, its schools of learning, but by its
homes. New York has all these, but its people live in tenements where
"all the conditions which surround childhood, youth, and womanhood make
for unrighteousness."[16] This still, after forty years of battling,
during which we have gone on piling layer upon layer of human beings and
calling _that_ home! The 15,309 tenements the Council of Hygiene found
in 1864 have become 47,000, and their population of 495,592 has swelled
into nearly a million and three-quarters.[17] There were four flights of
stairs at most in the old days. Now they build tenements six and seven
stories high, and the street has become a mere runway. It cannot take up
the crowds for which it was never meant. Go look at those East Side
streets on a summer evening or on any fair Sunday when, at all events,
some of the workers are at home, and see what they are like. In 1880 the
average number of persons to each dwelling in New York, counting them
all in, the rich and the poor, was 16