Under the great Bridge, whose piers have taken the place of much that was foulest in the Fourth Ward, stands a tenement-house so shadowed by the structure that, save at midday, natural light barely penetrates it. The inhabitants are of all grades and all nationalities. The men are chiefly 'longshoremen, working intermittently on the wharves, varying this occupation by long seasons of drinking, during which every pawnable article vanishes, to be gradually redeemed or altogether lost, according to the energy with which work is resumed. The women scrub offices, peddle fruit or small office necessities, take in washing, share, many of them, in the drinking bouts, and are, as a whole, content with brutishness, only vaguely conscious of a wretchedness that, so long as it is intermittent, is no spur to reform of methods. The same roof covers many who yield to none of these temptations, but are working patiently; some of them widows with children that must be fed; a few solitary, but banding with neighbors in cloak or pantaloon making, or the many forms of slop-work in the hands of sweaters. Sunshine has no place in these rooms which no enforced laws have made decent, and where occasional individual effort has power against the unspeakable filth ruling in tangible and intangible forms, sink and sewer and closet uniting in a common and all-pervading stench. The chance visitor has sometimes to rush to the outer air, deadly sick and faint at even a breath of this noisomeness. The most determined one feels inclined to burn every garment worn during such quest, and wonders if Abana or Pharpar or even Jordan itself could carry healing and cleansing in their floods.
The dark halls have other uses than as receptacles for refuse or filth. Hiding behind doors or in corners, or, grown bolder, seeking no concealment, children hardly more than babies teach one another such new facts of foulness as may so far have chanced to escape them,--baby voices reciting a ritual of oaths and obscenity learned in this Inferno, which, could it have place by Dante's, might be better known to a cultured generation. Only a Zola could describe deliberately what any eye may see, but any minute detail of which would excite an outburst of popular indignation. Yet I am by no means certain that such detail has not far more right to space than much that fills our morning papers, and that the plain bald statement of facts, shorn of all flights of fancy or play of facetiousness, might not rouse the public to some sense of what lies below the surface of this fair-seeming civilization of to-day. Not alone in the shadow of the great pier, but wherever men and women must herd like brutes, these things exist and shape the little lives that missions do not, and as yet cannot, reach, and that we prefer to deal with later, when actual violation of laws has placed them in the hands of the State. Work as she may, the woman who must find home for herself and children in such surroundings is powerless to protect them from the all-pervading foulness. They may escape a portion of the actual degradation. They can never escape a knowledge the possibility of which is unknown to what we call barbarism, but part and parcel of the daily life of civilization.