es necessary to knock a man down and arbitrate
sitting on him, and this was such a time. It was what we started out to
do with the rear tenements, the worst of the slum barracks, and it
would have been better had we kept on that track. I have always
maintained that we made a false move when we stopped to discuss damages
with the landlord, or to hear his side of it at all. His share in it was
our grievance; it blocked the mortality records with its burden of human
woe. The damage was all ours, the profit all his. If there are damages
to collect, he should foot the bill, not we. Vested rights are to be
protected, but, as I have said, no man has a right to be protected in
killing his neighbor.

[Illustration: Night in Gotham Court.]

However, they are down, the worst of them. The community has asserted
its right to destroy tenements that destroy life, and for that cause. We
bought the slum off in the Mulberry Bend at its own figure. On the rear
tenements we set the price, and set it low. It was a long step. Bottle
Alley is gone, and Bandits' Roost. Bone Alley, Thieves' Alley, and
Kerosene Row,--they are all gone. Hell's Kitchen and Poverty Gap have
acquired standards of decency; Poverty Gap has risen even to the height
of neckties. The time is fresh in my recollection when a different kind
of necktie was its pride; when the boy-murderer--he was barely
nineteen--who wore it on the gallows took leave of the captain of
detectives with the cheerful invitation to "come over to the wake.
They'll have a hell of a time." And the event fully redeemed the
promise. The whole Gap turned out to do the dead bully honor. I have not
heard from the Gap, and hardly from Hell's Kitchen, in five years. The
last news from the Kitchen was when the thin wedge of a column of
negroes, in their up-town migration, tried to squeeze in, and provoked a
race war; but that in fairness should not be laid up against it. In
certain local aspects it might be accounted a sacred duty; as much so as
to get drunk and provoke a fight on the anniversary of the battle of the
Boyne. But on the whole the Kitchen has grown orderly. The gang rarely
beats a policeman nowadays, and it has not killed one in a long while.

So, one after another, the outworks of the slum have been taken. It has
been beaten in many battles; even to the double-decker tenement on the
twenty-five-foot lot have we put a stop. But its legacy is with us in
the habitations of two million souls. T