sturdy, white-haired,
old farmer who followed the recital with keen interest, losing no word.
When he saw this picture of one of the Five Points, he spoke out loud:
"Yes! that is right. I was there." It turned out that he and his sister
had borne a hand in the attack upon that stronghold of the slum by the
forces of decency, in 1849 and 1850, which ended in the wiping out of
the city's worst disgrace. It was the first pitched battle in the fight.
Soon after he had come west and taken homestead land; but the daily
repetition during a lifetime of the message to men, which the woods and
the fields and God's open sky have in keeping, had not dulled his ears
to it, and after fifty years his interest in his brothers in the great
city was as keen as ever, his sympathies as quick. He had driven twenty
miles across the frozen prairie to hear my story. It is his kind who win
such battles, and a few of them go a long way.

[Illustration: The "Old Church" Tenement.]

A handful of Methodist women made the Five Points decent. To understand
what that meant, look at the "dens of death" in Baxter Street, which
were part of it, "houses," says the health inspector,[7] "into which the
sunlight never enters ... that are dark, damp, and dismal throughout all
the days of the year, and for which it is no exaggeration to say that
the money paid to the owners as rent is literally the 'price of blood.'"
It took us twenty-four years after that to register the conviction in
the form of law that that was good cause for the destruction of a
tenement in cold blood; but we got rid of some at that time in a fit of
anger. The mortality officially registered in those "dens of death" was
17.5 per cent of their population. We think now that the death-rate of
New York is yet too high at 19 or 20 in a thousand of the living.

[Footnote 7: Report of Board of Health, New York, 1869, p. 346.]

A dozen steps away in Mulberry Street, called "Death's Thoroughfare" in
the same report, were the "Old Church Tenements," part of the Five
Points and nearly the worst part. "One of the largest contributors to
the hospitals," this repulsive pile had seen the day when men and women
sat under its roof and worshipped God. When the congregation grew rich,
it handed over its house to the devil and moved up-town. That is not
putting it too strong. Counting in the front tenements that shut out
what little air and sunshine might otherwise have reached the wretched
tenants,