Since these lectures were delivered the struggle to preserve the tenement-house law has developed the fact that after thirty-seven years there are still over 300,000 windowless, dark rooms in the tenements of the Greater New York!
I must refer those who wish to get at the statistical facts to the reports of the successive Tenement House Commissions, or to my own record of the “Battle with the Slum,” in which I have tried to gather them all. Only let me mention here that the death rate of New York came down from 26.32 per 1,000 inhabitants, in 1887, to 19.53 in 1897. It had been known to run as high as 45 in 1,000 in bad seasons of the bad past; and in individual instances much higher than that.
What think you of “homes,” a hundred under one roof—a hundred families, mind you, not a hundred tenants—under the roof of a barrack stamped officially by the Health Board as a “den of death”? I will tell you what that Senate Investigation Committee of 1857 thought of them: “The conclusion forced itself upon the reflections of all that certain conditions and associations of life and habitation are the prolific parents of corresponding habits and morals.” Aye, they were. In that Sixth Ward slum grew up the Five Points. Out of it came the pigsty voters that voted Tweed and his thieves into possession of the city government, and the treasure, for which we had paid such a price, out of the pockets of the taxpayers, while the thieves mocked us and demanded what we were going to do about it. We had made money our idol, and it put its foot upon our necks and trod hard.
For that was it. The only question that had been asked till then was: What would they bring, those tenements? The tenant must “pay the rent or get out.” Indifference—popular neglect—that was the time for pulling it mildly; for men of standing, of influence in the community, drew the pay that was the price of selling the brother into slavery. Listen to this from the report of the Council of Hygiene: “Some of them,” meaning the owners of slum tenements, “are persons of the highest character, but they fail to appreciate the responsibility that rests upon them.” They did. They failed so signally that, when called to account by the health inspectors in the years that followed, they “urged the filthy habits of their tenants as an excuse for the condition of their property.” You will hear that plea, if you listen long enough and closely enough, even in our day. And whenever you hear it, stop right there and think who is to blame for the cultivation of those habits. The health inspector of whom I spoke had no doubts upon the subject. The owners, he said, are _entirely_ to blame. A pigsty, in time, will make a pig even of man who is made in the image of God. You can degrade him to that level if you try hard enough and are willing to pay the price.