scover enough to enlist his sympathies, provided he did not leave
them behind when he crossed the Bowery. The loss is his own then. There is
that in the desolation of child-life in those teeming hives to make the
shrivelled heart ache with compassion for its kind and throb with a new
life of pain, enough to dispel some prejudices that are as old as our
faith, and sometimes, I fear, a good deal stronger. The Russian exile adds
to the offence of being an alien and a disturber of economic balances the
worse one of being a Jew. Let those who cannot forgive this damaging fact
possess their souls in patience. There is some evidence that the welcome
he has received in those East Side tenements has done more than centuries
of persecution could toward making him forget it himself.

The Italian who comes here gravitates naturally to the oldest and most
dilapidated tenements in search of cheap rents, which he doesn't find. The
Jew has another plan, characteristic of the man. He seeks out the biggest
ones and makes the rent come within his means by taking in boarders,
"sweating" his flat to the point of police intervention. That that point
is a long way beyond human decency, let alone comfort, an instance from
Ludlow Street, that came to my notice while writing this, quite clearly
demonstrates. The offender was a tailor, who lived with his wife, two
children, and two boarders in two rooms on the top floor. [It is always
the top floor; in fifteen years of active service as a police reporter I
have had to climb to the top floor five times for every one my business
was further down, irrespective of where the tenement was or what kind of
people lived in it. Crime, suicide, and police business generally seem to
bear the same relation to the stairs in a tenement that they bear to
poverty itself. The more stairs the more trouble. The deepest poverty is
at home in the attic.] But this tailor; with his immediate household,
including the boarders, he occupied the larger of the two rooms. The
other, a bedroom eight feet square, he sublet to a second tailor and his
wife; which couple, following his example as their opportunities allowed,
divided the bedroom in two by hanging a curtain in the middle, took
one-half for themselves and let the other half to still another tailor
with a wife and child. A midnight inspection by the sanitary police was
followed by the arrest of the housekeeper and the original tailor, and
they were fined or warned in th