ero that the height of private dwellings should not exceed the measure
of seventy feet above the ground."

"Repeatedly" suggests that the jerry-builder was a hard nut to crack
then as now. As to Nero's edict, New York enacted it for its own
protection in our own generation.

[Illustration: One of the Five Points Fifty Years ago.]

Step now across eighteen centuries and all the chapters of the dreary
story to the middle of the century we have just left behind, and look
upon this picture of the New World's metropolis as it was drawn in
public reports at a time when a legislative committee came to New York
to see how crime and drunkenness came to be the natural crop of a
population "housed in crazy old buildings, crowded, filthy tenements in
rear yards, dark, damp basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and
stables converted into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter
brutes," or in towering tenements, "often carried up to a great height
without regard to the strength of the foundation walls." What matter?
They were not intended to last. The rent was high enough to make up for
the risk--to the property. The tenant was not considered. Nothing was
expected of him, and he came up to the expectation, as men have a trick
of doing. "Reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance
were left to work out their inevitable results, until the entire
premises reached the level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but
sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath smouldering,
water-rotted roofs, or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars."[5]

[Footnote 5: Report of Select Committee of Assembly. New York,
1857.]

We had not yet taken a lesson from Nero. That came later. But otherwise
we were abreast. No doubt the Roman landlord, like his New York brother
of a later day, when called to account, "urged the filthy habits of his
tenants as an excuse for the condition of the property." It has been the
landlord's plea in every age. "They utterly forgot," observes the
sanitarian who was set to clean up, "that it was the tolerance of those
habits which was the real evil, and that for this they themselves were
alone responsible."[6]

[Footnote 6: York Health Department Report, 1866, Appendix A, p. 6.]

Those days came vividly back to me last winter, when in a Wisconsin
country town I was rehearsing the story of the long fight, and pointing
out its meaning to us all. In the audience sat a