hing throughout the country. So did their holdings and
wealth-producing interests expand by a cumulative and ever-widening
process. The prisons were perennially filled with convicts, nearly all
of whom had committed some crime against property, and for so doing were
put in chains behind heavy bars, guarded by rifles and great stone
walls. But the men who robbed the community of its land and its
railroads (most of which latter were built with _public_ land and money)
and who defrauded it in a thousand ways, were, if not morally
exculpated, at least not molested, and were permitted to retain their
plunder, which, to them, was the all-important thing. This plunder, in
turn, became the basis for the foundation of an aristocracy which in
time built palaces, invented impressive pedigrees and crests and
coats-of-arms, intermarried with European titles, and either owned or
influenced newspapers and journals which taught the public how it should
think and how it should act. It is one thing to commit crimes against
property, and a vastly different thing to commit crimes _in behalf_ of
property. Such is the edict of a system inspired by the sway of
property.

RENTALS FROM DISEASE AND DEATH.

But the sources of the large rentals that flowed into the exchequers of
the landlords--what were they? Where did these rents, the volume of
which was so great that the surplus part of them went into other forms
of investments, come from? Who paid them and how did the tenants of
these mammoth landlords live?

A considerable portion came from business buildings and private
residences on much of the very land which New York City once owned and
which was corruptly squirmed out of municipal ownership. For the large
rentals which they were forced to pay, the business men recouped
themselves by marking up the prices of all necessities. Another, and a
very preponderate part, came from tenement houses. Many of these were
also built on land filched from the city. And such habitations! Never
before was anything seen like them. The reports of the Metropolitan
Board of Health for 1866, 1867 and succeeding years revealed the fact
that miles upon miles of city streets were covered with densely
populated tenements, where human beings were packed in vile rooms, many
of which were dark and unventilated and which were pestilential with
disease and overflowed with deaths. In its first report, following its
organization, the Metropolitan Board of Health point