Great houses are built for these destitute ones, and all the labor and self-denial in taking care of them is transferred to paid agents, while thousands of families are thus deprived of all opportunity to cultivate the distinctive virtues of the Christian household.
In this connection, let us look at some facts recently published in the city of New-York.
The writer, Rev. W. O. Van Meter, says in his report:
"The following astounding statistics are carefully selected from the Reports of the Police, Board of Health, Citizens' Association, and more than twelve years' personal experience."
He then gives the following description of a section of the city only a few rods from the stores and residences of those who count their wealth by hundreds of thousands and millions, many of them professing to be followers of Christ:
"First, we see old sheds, stable lofts, dilapidated buildings, too worthless to be repaired, lofts over warehouses and shops; cellars, too worthless for business purposes, and too unhealthy for horses or pigs, and therefore occupied by human beings at high rent.—Second, houses erected for tenant purposes. Take one near our Mission, as a fair specimen of the better class of 'model' tenant houses. It contains one hundred and twenty-six families—is entered at the sides from alleys eight feet wide; and by reason of another barrack of equal height, the rooms are so darkened, that on a cloudy day it is impossible to sew in them without artificial light. It has not one room that can be thoroughly ventilated.
"The vaults and sewers which are to carry off the filth of one hundred and twenty-six families have grated openings in the alleys, and doorways in the cellars, through which the deadly miasma penetrates and poisons the air of the house and courts. The water-closets for the whole vast establishment are a range of stalls, without doors, and accessible not only from the building, but even from the street. Comfort here is out of the question; common decency impossible, and the horrid brutalities of the passenger-ship are day after day repeated, but on a larger scale.
"In similar dwellings are living five hundred and ten thousand persons, (nearly one half of the inhabitants of the city,) chiefly from the laboring classes, of very moderate means, and also the uncounted thousands of those who do not know to-day what they shall have to live on to-morrow. This immense population is found chiefly in an area of less than four square miles. The vagrant and neglected children among them would form a procession in double file eight miles long from the Battery to Harlem.
"In the Fourth ward, the tenant-house population is crowded at the rate of two hundred and ninety thousand inhabitants to the square mile. Such packing was probably never equaled in any other city. Were the buildings occupied by these miserable creatures removed, and the people placed by each other, there would be but one and two ninths of a square yard for each, and this unparalleled packing is increasing. Two hundred and twenty-four families in the ward live below the sidewalk, many of them below high-water mark. Often in very high tide they are driven from their cellars or lie in bed until the tide ebbs. Not one half of the houses have any drain or connection with the sewer. The liquid refuse is emptied on the sidewalk or into the street, giving forth sickening exhalations, and uniting its fetid streams with others from similar sources. There are more than four hundred families in this ward whose homes can only be reached by wading through a disgusting deposit of filthy refuse. 'In one tenant-house one hundred and forty-six were sick with small-pox, typhus fever, scarlatina, measles, marasmus, phthisis pulmonalis, dysentery, and chronic diarrhea. In another, containing three hundred and forty-nine persons, one in nineteen died during the year, and on the day of inspection, which was during the most healthy season of the year, there were one hundred and fifteen persons sick! In another (in the Sixth Ward, but near us,) are sixty-five families; seventy-seven persons were sick or diseased at the time of inspection, and one in four always sick. In fifteen of these families twenty-five children were living, thirty-seven had died.'
"Here are found the lowest class of sailor boarding-houses, dance- houses, and dens of infamy. There are less than two dwelling-houses for each rum-hole. Here are the poorest, vilest, most degraded, and desperate representatives of all nations. In the homes of thousands here, a ray of sunlight never shines, a flower never blooms, a bird song is never heard, a breath of pure air never breathed." A procession of vagrant and neglected children that in double file would reach eight miles, living in such filth, vice, and unhealthful pollution; all of them God's children, all Christ's younger brethren, to save whom he humbled himself, even to the shameful death of the cross!