dark rooms in Greater New York. And these are almost entirely
occupied by the foreigners. But unsanitary conditions prevail also in
all the cities, large and small, and especially in the mine and mill and
factory towns, wherever large masses of the poorest workers live.

[Sidenote: Legal Remedies Possible]

Concerning possible legislation to correct these city evils of
environment, Mr. Sargent says: "So far as the overcrowding in city
tenements is concerned, municipal ordinances in our large cities
prescribing the amount of space which rapacious landlords should, under
penalties sufficiently heavy to enforce obedience, be required to give
each tenant, would go far toward attaining the object in view. Whether
such a plan could be brought into existence through the efforts of our
general government, or whether the Congress could itself legislate
directly, upon sanitary and moral grounds, against the notorious
practice of housing aliens with less regard for health and comfort than
is shown in placing brute animals in pens, the Bureau is unprepared to
say.

[Sidenote: Demands Immediate Remedy]

It is, however, convinced that no feature of the immigration question so
insistently demands public attention and effective action. The evil to
be removed is one that is steadily and rapidly on the increase, and its
removal will strike at the root of fraudulent elections, poverty,
disease, and crime in our large cities, and on the other hand largely
supply that increasing demand for labor to develop the natural resources
of our country."[71]

[Sidenote: Little Italy]

Not to draw the picture all in the darker shades, let us look at the
best type of Italian tenement life. We are not left to guesswork in the
matter. Settlement workers and students of social questions are actually
living in the tenement and slum sections, so as to know by experience
and not hearsay. One of these investigators, Mrs. Lillian W. Betts,
author of two enlightening books,[72] has lived for a year in one of the
most crowded tenements in one of the most densely populated sections of
the Italian quarter. We condense some of her statements, which reveal
the foreign life of to-day in New York's Little Italy, with its 400,000
souls.

[Sidenote: Immigrant Isolation]

"A year's residence in an Italian tenement taught me first of all the
isolation of a foreign quarter; how completely cut off one may be from
everything that makes New York New York. The necess