great
corporation, which is simply the English land system complete. It
refuses to sell the land, but rents it for long periods, and the
tenant builds the house, and then when the lease expires, the
Corporation takes over the house for a nominal sum. Thus it has
purchased houses for as low as $200, and made them into tenements, and
rented them to the swarming poor for a total of fifty dollars a month.
The houses were not built for tenements, they have no conveniences,
they are not fit for the habitation of animals.

The article, in Everybody's Magazine for July, 1908, gives pictures of
them, which are horrible beyond belief. To quote the writer again:

Decay, neglect and squalor seem to brood wherever Trinity is
an owner. Gladly would I give to such a charitable and
benevolent institution all possible credit for a spirit of
improvement manifested anywhere, but I can find no such
manifestation. I have tramped the Eighth Ward day after day
with a list of Trinity properties in my hand, and of all the
tenement houses that stand there on Trinity land, I have not
found one that is not a disgrace to civilization and to the
City of New York.

It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided over this
Corporation of Corruption. I imagine how he would have shivered and
turned pale had some angel whispered to him what devilish utterances
were some day to proceed from the lips of the little cherub with
shining face and shining robes who acted as the bishop's attendant in
the stately ceremonials of the Church! Truly, even into the goodly
company of the elect, even to the most holy places of the temple,
Satan makes his treacherous way! Even under the consecrated hands of
the bishop! For while the bishop was blessing me and taking me into
the company of the sanctified, I was thinking about what the papers
had reported, that the bishop's wife had been robbed of fifty thousand
dollars worth of jewels! It did not seem quite in accordance with the
doctrine of Jesus that a bishop's wife should possess fifty thousand
dollars worth of jewels, or that she should be setting the bloodhounds
of the police on the train of a human being. I asked my clergyman
friend about it, and remember his patient explanation--that the bishop
had to know all classes and conditions of men: his wife had to go
among the rich as well as the poor, and must be able to dress so that
she would not be embarras