foul spot which had
sorely, tried the patience of us all. A carriage factory took the place
of the Big Flat when it had become a disgusting scandal. Jersey Street,
a short block between Mulberry and Crosby streets, to which no
Whitechapel slum could hold a candle, became a factory-street. No one
lives there now. The last who did was murdered by the gang that grew as
naturally out of its wickedness as a toadstool grows on a rotten log. He
kept the saloon on the corner of Crosby Street. Saloon and tenements are
gone together. Where they were are rows of factories, empty and silent
at night. A man may go safely there now at any hour. I should not have
advised strangers to try that when it was at its worst, though Police
Headquarters was but a block away.

[Illustration: The Survival of the Unfittest.]

I photographed that phase of the battle with the slum just before they
shut in the last tenement in the block with a factory building in its
rear. It stood for a while after that down in a deep sort of pocket with
not enough light struggling down on the brightest of days to make out
anything clearly in the rooms,--truly a survival of the unfittest; but
the tenants stayed. They had access through a hallway on Crosby Street;
they had never been used to a yard; as for the darkness, that they had
always been used to. They were "manured to the soil," in the words of
Mrs. Partington. But at length business claimed the last foot of the
block, and peace came to it and to us.

All the while we were learning. It was emphatically a campaign of
education. When the cholera threatened there was the old disposition to
lie down under the visitation and pray. The council pointed to the
fifteen hundred cases of smallpox ferreted out by its inspectors "in a
few days," and sternly reminded the people of Lord Palmerston's advice
to those who would stay an epidemic with a national fast, that they had
better turn to and clean up. We pray nowadays with broom in hand, and
the prayer tells. Do not understand me as discouraging the prayer; far
from it. But I would lend an edge to it with the broom that cuts. That
kind of foolishness we got rid of; the other kind that thinks the
individual's interest superior to the public good--that is the thing we
have got to fight till we die. But we made notches in that on which to
hang arguments that stick. Human life then counted for less than the
landlord's profits; to-day it is weighed in the scale against th