[Illustration: BANANA SELLER.]
On some of the walls of these living rooms the cockroaches and bed-bugs swarm in abundance, literally by hundreds, at ten o'clock in the morning. The walls and ceilings have not only not been cleansed or whitened this year, but it must have been many years since there has been an attempt made to clean them. In one of these bedrooms I counted twenty-five boxes of lemons, besides great bunches of half-ripened bananas. Live chickens were kept under the bed in one of these rooms. The fruit which is ripened in these places is sold daily in every section of the city, and people who live with healthful surroundings, far away from this pestilent hole, are risking the health of themselves and their children, unwittingly, by purchasing fruit that cannot help but have absorbed something of the poison from the atmosphere of these filthy, crowded quarters. The Board of Health know about this place, for their sign is put up over the doors of these rooms, telling how many are allowed to sleep in each room; but they might as well have kept the sign in the office for all the good it has done, for in nearly every room the inmates admitted to the Italian interpreter who accompanied me, that from two to three times as many persons occupied the room as the sign permits. One of these buildings, four stories high, is so old and rickety that it cannot stand alone, and has careened over against the building next to it. Everything is of wood, and if it was once on fire, with its narrow, obstructed halls and stairways, the swarm of tenants would burn like rats in a trap.
This is by no means an isolated case. When Rev. Mr. Barnett, of Whitechapel, London, was here a few days ago, one of the inspectors of the Board of Health took him to visit some of the tenement houses of South Boston and the North End. A Boston Herald reporter went with them, and I quote from his report of the trip: "The party first visited the tenement houses of South Boston, occupied for the most part by the fishermen and their families, and the poorer classes of the Irish population. The first one visited was the house known as the Slate block on First Street. Here was seen one of the best examples of the worst class of dwellings, and one in which legislation had accomplished but little. Here was a building where the law had not been complied with regarding whitewashing, and the walls were dirty and stained with smoke. Hardly a house was seen, in the whole course of the journey, where this simple law in the interest of health and sanitary condition of living had been observed. In many cases, it appeared as though it had not only been neglected this spring, but for many springs in the past. In driving from this section of the city to the North End, Mr. Barnett made the somewhat startling remark, 'We have nothing nearly so bad as this in Whitechapel.'"
[Illustration: UNDER-GROUND TENEMENT WITH TWO BEDS.]
Doesn't it seem a little strange to an outsider that the Board of Health keep on hand, as it were, block after block of tenement houses, where both landlords and tenants deliberately set the law at defiance, which they can show off at call? There could not be a greater folly than to put this question aside as a matter only interesting to those poor people themselves. The slavery of Uncle Tom and his woolly-headed children cursed the plantation house, in the end, as much as it did the cabin. We must look after these people and help them for the sake of others, if not on their own account. Dr. John S. Billings, in an address before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in February of this year, says: "When diphtheria prevails in a tenement house, many school children are endangered, and the most perfect plumbing in a house affords little protection against the entrance of this disease, if it is prevailing in the vicinity. Typhus and smallpox do not confine their ravages to the vicious and foul, after they have acquired malignancy amongst them. Mingled with those who might not be worth saving, is a much larger number of honest, industrious, and fairly intelligent and energetic poor people who live by days' wages, and are struggling against their surroundings to improve their condition, and especially to give their children a fairer chance in the race for life than they themselves have had. These last are the people whom it is worth while to help for their own sake. You will observe," says this cool-headed doctor, "that I am considering this matter entirely from the money point of view, without reference to religion or morals or altruism. The question, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is far more important, I admit; but I confine myself to a lower plane—to the bread-and-butter aspects of municipal life. Great numbers of the incompetent, vicious, idle, deformed, or starved-brain class have been poured into this country by immigration during the last fifty years, and have filled our slums and tenement houses, our hospitals, asylums, alms-houses, and jails to overflowing. They cannot escape the results of their physical organization, which, in its turn, is an inherited result of ancestral degeneration. For them we may 'hope the best, but hold the present, fatal daughter of the past.' Their death rates are from two to three times as great as those of the better class of population; one-fourth of their sickness is treated by charities, and one-third of those who die among them are buried at public expense. The districts in which they live require a larger proportion of the work of city officials, inspections, removal of nuisances, police, the courts, etc.; and, on the other hand, they contribute but little to municipal or other taxation. All this is well known; but we have not yet arrived at the stage of applying efficient and systematic prevention, which is perfectly possible, and are still pottering with the so-called remedies which are of little use. In these districts the deaths usually outnumber the births, so that if it were not for a continued stream of new recruits this population would diminish. How can accessions be prevented? One way is to get rid of and prevent additions to the kind of dwellings these people seek. Do you say that they must live somewhere, and that there must be such places for such people? I do not think so. It is not necessary that any city should allow the existence of any such houses within its limits; and if their destruction forces some persons into the almshouses, and drives others away, it will be the cheapest and best in the end."
There are scores, and I think I should be safe to say hundreds, of tenement houses within the city limits of Boston which are unfit to be inhabited, and where the landlords do not pretend to obey the laws of health required by the statutes, and yet the tenants are paying a sufficiently large rent to pay good interest on a clean, healthful tenement. Our modern science and our Christian civilization are alike challenged by this condition of things.
Yet, as you think of the horror of these Boston "cabins" and their miserable tenants, you will say, "They are at least free, they cannot be bought and sold like Uncle Tom." Alas! they are not free. True, no one can take them to an auction-block, but their bondage is none the less real. Into that fearfully neglected Italian tenement house which I have tried to describe in this discourse, the sweater had come, and women were making a fine class of knee pants for twenty cents a dozen pairs, which means forty cents a day in wages. These people find it impossible to save. The lower strata of wages in Boston, and in all our large cities, has reached the point where the people who depend on them labor simply to exist. One day's sickness in father or mother or child leaves a gap it takes weeks or months to bridge over again.
[Illustration: TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING.]
Sometimes a Southern Uncle Tom or Aunt Chloe had their son or daughter sold out of their arms, leaving them with broken hearts. But the white slaves of the tenement house sound every deep of human agony. Think what it is to try to raise boys honest, when their playmates are thieves from the cradle! Think of the agony of a mother fighting the wolf of starvation day and night and finding, as, one Boston mother did only a few weeks ago, that the wolf of lust had devoured her one ewe lamb before she was yet thirteen years of age! Brothers, it is not yet time for the "abolitionist" to put aside his tocsin or his sword while so many of our brothers and sisters are living and sighing in their despair:—
"Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,
Forgetting that the world is fair;