nience to the lawbreakers with which it swarmed. Thieves and thugs
made it a runway, and decent people shunned it. Other philanthropists,
with the will but without the wisdom that was needed, took it up and
tried to make a workingwoman's home of it; but that end was worse than
the beginning. The women would have none of the rules that went with
the philanthropy, and the Big Flat lapsed back among the slum tenements
and became the worst of a bad lot. I speak of it here because just now
the recollection of it is a kind of a milestone in the battle with the
slum. Twenty years after, A. T. Stewart, the merchant prince, set
another in the Park Avenue Hotel which he intended for his
working-girls; and that was a worse failure than the first, for it never
served the purpose he intended for it. And now, just as I am writing
this, they are putting the finishing touches to a real woman's hotel
up-town which will not be a failure, though it will hardly reach the
same class which the remodellers of the Big Flat had in mind. However,
we shall get there, too, now we know the way.

Slowly, with many setbacks, we battled our way into the light. A Board
of Health had come with the cholera panic in 1866. The swine that ran at
large in the streets, practically the only scavengers, were banished.
The cholera and the yellow fever that had ravaged the city by turns
never came back. The smallpox went its way, too,[10] and was heard of
again only once as an epidemic, till people had forgotten what it was
like,--enough to make them listen to the anti-vaccination cranks,--and
politics had the health department by the throat again and held the gate
open. We acquired tenement house laws, and the process of education that
had begun with the foraging ground of the swine was extended step by
step to the citizen's home. Short steps and cautious were they. Every
obstacle which the landlord's cunning and the perversion of the
machinery of the law to serve his interests could devise was thrown in
the way. It was a new doctrine to that day that any power should
intervene between him and the tenants who represented his income, and it
was held to be a hardship if not downright robbery. The builder took the
same view. Every tenement house plan was the subject of hot debate
between the Health Board and the builder, or his architect. The smallest
air-shaft had to be wrung out of him, as it were, by main strength. The
church itself was too often on the side of t