ies ordinarily as to be seldom answered as promptly and as
honestly as in the case of a little fellow whom I found in front of St.
George's Church, engaged in the aesthetic occupation of pelting the
Friends' Seminary across the way with mud. There were two of them, and
when I asked them the question that estranged Tony, the wicked one dug his
fists deep down in the pockets of his blue-jeans trousers and shook his
head gloomily. He couldn't read; didn't know how; never did.

"He?" said the other, who could, "he? He don't learn nothing. He throws
stones." The wicked one nodded. It was the extent of his education.

But if the three R's suffer neglect among the children of the poor, their
lessons in the three D's--Dirt, Discomfort, and Disease--that form the
striking features of their environment, are early and thorough enough. The
two latter, at least, are synonymous terms, if dirt and discomfort are
not. Any dispensary doctor knows of scores of cases of ulceration of the
eye that are due to the frequent rubbing of dirty faces with dirty little
hands. Worse filth diseases than that find a fertile soil in the
tenements, as the health officers learn when typhus and small-pox break
out. It is not the desperate diet of ignorant mothers, who feed their
month-old babies with sausage, beer, and Limburger cheese, that alone
accounts for the great infant mortality among the poor in the tenements.
The dirt and the darkness in their homes contribute their full share, and
the landlord is more to blame than the mother. He holds the key to the
situation which her ignorance fails to grasp, and it is he who is
responsible for much of the unfounded and unnecessary prejudice against
foreigners, who come here willing enough to fall in with the ways of the
country that are shown to them. The way he shows them is not the way of
decency. I am convinced that the really injurious foreigners in this
community, outside of the walking delegate's tribe, are the foreign
landlords of two kinds: those who, born in poverty abroad, have come up
through tenement-house life to the ownership of tenement property, with
all the bad traditions of such a career; and the absentee landlords of
native birth who live and spend their rents away from home, without
knowing or caring what the condition of their property is, so the income
from it suffer no diminution. There are honorable exceptions to the first
class, but few enough to the latter to make them hardly worth