em.
Property still has powerful pull. "Vested rights" rise up and confront
you, and no matter how loudly you may protest that no man has the right
to kill his neighbor, they are still there. No one will contradict you,
but they won't yield--till you make them. In a hundred ways you are made
to feel that vested rights are sacred, if human life is not. But the
glory is that you _can_ make them yield. You couldn't then.

We haven't reached the millennium yet. But let us be glad. A hundred
years ago they hanged a woman on Tyburn Hill for stealing a loaf of
bread. To-day we destroy the den that helped make her a thief.

CHAPTER II

THE OUTWORKS OF THE SLUM TAKEN

I said that we got our grip when the civic conscience awoke in 1879. In
that year the slum was arraigned in the churches. The sad and shameful
story was told of how it grew and was fostered by avarice that saw in
the homeless crowds from over the sea only a chance for business, and
exploited them to the uttermost; how Christianity, citizenship, human
fellowship, shook their skirts clear of the rabble that was only good
enough to fill the greedy purse, and how the rabble, left to itself,
improved such opportunities as it found after such fashion as it knew;
how it ran elections merely to count its thugs in, and fattened at the
public crib; and how the whole evil thing had its root in the tenements,
where the home had ceased to be sacred,--those dark and deadly dens in
which the family ideal was tortured to death, and character was
smothered; in which children were "damned rather than born" into the
world, thus realizing a slum kind of foreordination to torment, happily
brief in many cases. The Tenement House Commission long afterward
called the worst of the barracks "infant slaughter houses," and showed,
by reference to the mortality lists, that they killed one in every five
babies born in them.

[Illustration: The Rear Tenement grows up. An Alley condemned by the
Council of Hygiene.]

The story shocked the town into action. Plans for a better kind of
tenement were called for, and a premium was put on every ray of light
and breath of air that could be let into it. It was not much, for the
plans clung to the twenty-five-foot lot which was the primal curse, and
the type of tenement evolved, the double-decker of the "dumb-bell"
shape, while it seemed at the time a great advance upon the black, old
packing-box kind, came with the great growth of our city t