This gregarious life leads to great independence of character among the women; the average survivor of the tenement house is no puny, frightened creature, but a very active animal, ready to scratch, retort, appeal to law, and loves and marries as she wishes. There is some natural deviation from virtue, as from cleanliness, yet the recuperative principle in women, as in men, is at least redeeming, and it is to be doubted whether the vices in the tenement houses exceed those in the fashionable streets.
It is believed here that the worst class of people New York possesses are the Bohemians from northern Austria. This degraded race was at one time, or until the emperors destroyed it politically, the repository of most of the vices of Europe. Among the Bohemians you find the domestic virtues at the lowest ebb, and socialism at its lewdest. A manufacturer was recently telling me of two Bohemians in his employment who grew weary of their wives, and without any other marriage, and without quarrel, they agreed, men and women, to change partners, and continue to live and work together. At a recent strike of cigar makers in this city, a working woman who stripped tobacco was set upon by three men and knocked down because she preferred to take lower wages rather than keep idle and support some of the demagogue patrols.
New York, however, has no such dens to-day as it had forty years ago, when the Five Points was in the height of its orgies. Through that old swampy quarter of the city broad streets have been cut, and manufactories have been established. I have my doubts whether, at this moment, the worst features of New York’s population are not to be found in some of the rougher suburbs off the island. The draft riots of 1863 assisted the peace and order of New York by bringing about a collision between the very bad elements and the law. The police, who are generally hated by the vicious as the visible representatives of the law, received from that moment a degree of discipline which has ever since been kept up, and the militia regiments of New York City have been provided with large armories, and are in a fair state of discipline.
Of course, in such a rank soil as this island, the gentler virtues do not grow, but my observation of some rural districts, many hundred miles from this city, is that they are far below the tenement house quarter in intelligence, and not above it in morals. The matter of virtue is to a large extent involved in the race; it will take a long time to debauch, utterly, people descended from the British and Germanic races. Fortunately, we have not had much immigration from the south of Europe, but the Italian quarter is attracting some attention, as possibly the worst we possess. The Chinese in New York are self-reliant, and a good many of them have shown a decided bias to be Christianized. I lived near a church, two or three years ago, where I one day observed a large number of Chinese, and glancing up at the church I saw that it was a Baptist one. On inquiry I found that a Chinaman who attended the Sunday-school of that church had been murdered by some semi-American roughs, and his classmates had come to pay the last honors to him. Like Americans, they came in cabs, and came filing out of that church quiet, uncomplaining, injured specimens of our common brotherhood.
Legally, a tenement house in New York is one house occupied by more than three families living independently of each other, and doing their cooking on the premises. All tenement houses are compelled to have fire-escapes built outside of the house, of iron. There is one quarter of New York City where 300,000 persons are said to live on a square mile. Observers now say that not one-third, but one-half of the population of New York City lives on the tenement house plan.
A superficial observer here would think that the greatest misery on the globe was to be found in this tenement house quarter, yet I think that much of this sympathy will be thrown away, because in the large majority of cases the people who live under this system would not exchange it for any other.
THE CAÑONS OF THE COLORADO.
A lecture delivered on Saturday, April 26, in the National Museum, Washington, D. C., by Major J. W. Powell, Director of the U. S. Geological Survey.