he enemy, where its material
interests were involved. Trinity, the wealthiest church corporation in
the land, was in constant opposition as a tenement house landlord, and
finally, to save a few hundred dollars, came near upsetting the whole
structure of tenement law that had been built up in the interest of the
toilers and of the city's safety with such infinite pains. The courts
were reluctant. Courts in such matters record rather than lead the state
of the public mind, and now that the immediate danger of an epidemic was
over, the public mind had a hard time grasping the fact that bettering
the housing of the poor was simple protection for the community. When
suit was brought against a bad landlord, judges demanded that the
department must prove not only that a certain state of soil saturation,
for instance, was dangerous to health, but that some one had been
actually made sick by that specified nuisance. Fat-boilers,
slaughter-house men, and keepers of other nuisances made common cause
against the new decency, and with these obstacles in front, the
Sanitarians found the enemy constantly recruited from the rear. With the
immense immigration that poured in after the Civil War, the evil with
which they were struggling grew enormously. Economic problems other than
the old one of rent came to vex us. The sweater moved into the East Side
tenements. Child-labor grew and swelled.

[Footnote 10: They had "health wardens" in the old days, and the
Council of Hygiene tells of the efficient way two of them fought the
smallpox. One stood at the foot of the stairs and yelled to those
minding a patient in the next story to "put pieces of camphor about
the clothes of the sick and occasionally throw a piece on the hot
stove." The other summoned the occupants of a smallpox smitten
tenement to the hall door and cautioned them to say nothing about it
to any one, or he would send them all to the pest-house!]

The tenement had grown its logical crop. In the sweating conspiracy it
is a prime factor. Its extortionate rates make the need, and the need of
the poor was ever the opportunity of their oppressor. What they have to
take becomes the standard of all the rest. Sweating is only a modern
name for it. The cause is as old as the slum itself.

[Illustration: Jersey Street Rookeries.]

However, the new light was not without its allies. Chief among them was
the onward march of business that wiped out many a