x 300, population 2609, rate per acre 1894.]

These are the facts. The question is, are they beyond our control? Let
us look at them squarely and see. In the first place, it is no answer to
the charge that New York's way of housing its workers is the worst in
the world to say that they are better off than they were where they came
from. It is not true, in most cases, as far as the home is concerned; a
shanty is better than a flat in a slum tenement, any day. Even if it
were true, it would still be beside the issue. In Poland my capmaker
counted for nothing. Nothing was expected of him. Here he ranks, after a
few brief years, politically equal with the man who hires his labor. A
citizen's duty is expected of him, and home and citizenship are
convertible terms. The observation of the Frenchman who had watched the
experiment of herding two thousand human beings in eight tenement
barracks over yonder, that the result was the "exasperation of the
tenant against society," is true the world over. We have done as badly
in New York. Social hatefulness is not a good soil for citizenship to
grow in, where political equality rules.

Nor is it going to help us any to charge it all to the tenant "who
_will_ herd." He herds because he has no other chance; because it puts
money into some one's pockets to let him. We never yet have passed a law
for his relief that was not attacked in the same or the next legislature
in the interest of the tenement-house builder. Commission after
commission has pointed out that the tenants are "better than the houses
they live in"; that they "respond quickly to improved conditions." Those
are not honest answers. The man who talks that way is a fool, or worse.

The truth is that if we cannot stop the crowds from coming, we _can_
make homes for those who come, and at a profit on the investment. That
has been proved, is being proved now every day. It is not a case of
transforming human nature in the tenant, but of reforming it in the
landlord builder. It is a plain question of the per cent he is willing
to take.

So then, we have got it on the moral ground where it belongs. Let the
capmaker's case be ever so strong, we shall yet win. We shall win his
fight and our own together; they are one. This is the way it stands at
the outset of the twentieth century: New York's housing is still the
worst in the world. We have the biggest crowds. We have been killing
the home that is our very life at the most reckle