rer's only chance for life,
and only the slenderest of chances at that.

Carmen was the victim of the stubborn ignorance that dreads the hospital
and the doctor above the discomfort of the dirt and darkness and suffering
that are its every-day attendants. Her parents were no worse than the
Monroe Street mother who refused to let the health officer vaccinate her
baby, because her crippled boy, with one leg an inch shorter than the
other, had "caught it"--the lame leg, that is to say--from his
vaccination. She knew it was so, and with ignorance of that stamp there is
no other argument than force. But another element entered into the case of
a sick Essex Street baby. The tenement would not let it recover from a bad
attack of scarlet fever, and the parents would not let it be taken to the
country or to the sea-shore, despite all efforts and entreaties. When
their motive came out at last, it proved to be a mercenary one. They were
behind with the rent, and as long as they had a sick child in the house
the landlord could not put them out. Sick, the baby was to them a source
of income, at all events a bar to expense, and in that way so much
capital. Well, or away, it would put them at the mercy of the
rent-collector at once. So they chose to let it suffer. The parents were
Jews, a fact that emphasizes the share borne by desperate poverty in the
transaction, for the family tie is notoriously strong among their people.

No doubt Mott Street echoed with the blare of brass bands when poor little
Carmen was carried from her bed of long suffering to her grave in Calvary.
Scarce a day passes now in these tenements that does not see some little
child, not rarely a new-born babe, carried to the grave in solemn state,
preceded by a band playing mournful dirges and followed by a host with
trailing banners, from some wretched home that barely sheltered it alive.
No suspicion of the ludicrous incongruity of the show disturbs the
paraders. It seems as if, but one remove from the dump, an insane passion
for pomp and display, perhaps a natural reaction from the ash-barrel, lies
in wait for this Italian, to which he falls a helpless victim. Not content
with his own national and religious holidays and those he finds awaiting
him here, he has invented or introduced a system of his own, a sort of
communal celebration of proprietary saints, as it were, that has taken
Mulberry Street by storm. As I understand it, the townsmen of some Italian
villag