zen--from which, if I had
to live there, I should certainly escape to the saloon with its
brightness and cheer as often and as long as I could to brood there
perhaps over the fate which sowed desolation in one man's path that
another might reap wealth and luxury. That last might not be my way, but
it is a human way, and it breeds hatred which is not good mortar for us
to build with. It does not bind. Let us remember that and just be
sensible about things, or we shall not get anywhere.

[Illustration: Gotham Court.]

By which I do not mean that we are not getting anywhere; for we are.
Look at Gotham Court, described in the health reports of the sixties as
a "packing-box tenement" of the hopeless back-to-back type, which meant
that there was no ventilation and could be none. The stenches from the
"horribly foul cellars" with their "infernal system of sewerage" must
needs poison the tenants all the way up to the fifth story. I knew the
court well, knew the gang that made its headquarters with the rats in
the cellar, terrorizing the helpless tenants; knew the well-worn rut of
the dead-wagon and the ambulance to the gate, for the tenants died there
like flies in all seasons, and a tenth of its population was always in
the hospital. I knew the story of how it had been built by a Quaker with
good intentions, but without good sense, for the purpose of rescuing
people from the awful cellar-holes they burrowed in around there,--this
within fifty-one years of the death of George Washington, who lived just
across the street on the crest of Cherry Hill when he was
President,--and how in a score of years from the time it was built it
had come to earn the official description, "a nuisance which, from its
very magnitude, is assumed to be unremovable and irremediable."[9] That
was at that time. But I have lived to see it taken in hand three times,
once by the landlord under compulsion of the Board of Health, once by
Christian men bent upon proving what could be done on their plan with
the worst tenement house. And a good deal was accomplished. The
mortality was brought below the general death-rate of the city, and the
condition of the living was made by comparison tolerable. Only the best
was bad in that spot, on account of the good Quaker's poor sense, and
the third time the court was taken in hand it was by the authorities,
who destroyed it, as they should have done a generation before. Oh, yes,
we are getting there; but that sort of