he was arrested and sent to Sing Sing for ten years, for
manslaughter.

[Illustration: Dens of Death.]

That time he had forgotten to put lime in the mortar. It was just sand.
When the houses fell in the sight of men, the law was at last able to
make him responsible. It failed in the matter of the soil pipe. It does
sometimes to this very day. Knocking a man in the head with an axe, or
sticking a knife into him, goes against the grain. Slowly poisoning a
hundred so that the pockets of one be made to bulge may not even banish
a man from respectable society. We are a queer lot in some things.
However, that is hardly quite fair to society. It is a fact that that
part of it which would deserve the respect of its fellow-citizens has
got rid of its tenement-house property in recent years. It speculates in
railway shares now.

Twenty cases of typhoid fever from a single house in one year was the
record that had gone unconsidered. Bedrooms in tenements were dark
closets, utterly without ventilation. There couldn't be any. The houses
were built like huge square boxes, covering nearly the whole of the lot.
Some light came in at the ends, but the middle was always black. Forty
thousand windows, cut by order of the Health Board that first year, gave
us a daylight view of the slum: "damp and rotten and dark, walls and
banisters sticky with constant moisture." Think of living babies in such
hell-holes; and make a note of it, you in the young cities who can still
head off the slum where we have to wrestle with it for our sins. Put a
brand upon the murderer who would smother babies in dark holes and
bedrooms. He is nothing else. Forbid the putting of a house five stories
high, or six, on a twenty-five foot lot, unless at least thirty-five per
cent of the lot be reserved for sunlight and air. Forbid it absolutely,
if you can. It is the devil's job, and you will have to pay his dues in
the end, depend on it.

And while you are about it make a note of a fact we let go unheeded too
long to our harm, and haven't grasped fully yet. The legislative
committee of 1857 said it: "to prevent drunkenness provide every man
with a clean and comfortable home." Call it paternalism, crankery, any
other hard name you can think of, all the same it goes down underneath
the foundation of things. I have known drunkards to wreck homes a plenty
in my time; but I have known homes, too, that made drunkards by the
shortest cut. I know a dozen now--yes, ten do