ss rate. But, badly as
we are off and shall be off for years to come,--allowing even that we
are getting worse off in the matter of crowding,--we know now that we
can do better. We have done it. We are every year wresting more light
and air from the builder. He no longer dares come out and fight in the
open, for he knows that public sentiment is against him. The people
understand--to what an extent is shown in a report of a Tenement House
Committee in the city of Yonkers, which the postman put on my table this
minute. The committee was organized "to prevent the danger to Yonkers of
incurring the same evils that have fallen so heavily upon New York and
have cost that city millions of money and thousands of lives." It sprang
from the Civic League, was appointed by a Republican mayor and indorsed
by a Democratic council! That is as it should be. So, we shall win.

In fact, we are winning now, backed by this very understanding. The
double-decker is doomed, and the twenty-five-foot lot has had its day.
We are building tenements in which it is possible to rear homes. We are
at last in a fair way to make the slum unprofitable, and that is the
only way to make it go. So that we may speed it the more let us go with
the capmaker a while and get his point of view. After all, that is the
one that counts; the community is not nearly as much interested in the
profits of the landlord as in the welfare of the workers.

That we may get it fairly, suppose we take a stroll through a
tenement-house neighborhood and see for ourselves. We were in Stanton
Street. Let us start there, then, going east. Towering barracks on
either side, five, six stories high. Teeming crowds. Push-cart men
"moved on" by the policeman, who seems to exist only for the purpose.
Forsyth Street: there is a church on the corner, Polish and Catholic, a
combination that strikes one as queer here on the East Side, where
Polish has come to be synonymous with Jewish. I have cause to remember
that corner. A man killed his wife in this house, and was hanged for it.
Just across the street, on the stoop of that brown-stone tenement, the
tragedy was reenacted the next year; only the murderer saved the county
trouble and expense by taking himself off also. That other stoop in the
same row witnessed a suicide.

Why do I tell you these things? Because they are true. The policeman
here will bear me out. They belong to the ordinary setting of life in a
crowd such as this. It is ne