ed out:

The first, and at all times the most prolific cause of disease,
was found to be the very insalubrious condition of most of the
tenement houses in the cities of New York and Brooklyn. These
houses are generally built without any reference to the health and
comfort of the occupants, but simply with a view to economy and
profit to the owner. They are almost invariably overcrowded, and
ill-ventilated to such a degree as to render the air within them
constantly impure and offensive.

Here follows a mass of nauseating details which for the sake of not
overshocking the reader we shall omit. The report continued:

The halls and stairways are usually filthy and dark, and the walls
and banisters foul and damp, while the floors were not
infrequently used ... [for purposes of nature] ... for lack of
other provisions. The dwelling rooms are usually very inadequate
in size for the accommodation of their occupants, and many of the
sleeping rooms are simply closets, without light or ventilation
save by means of a single door.... Such is the character of a vast
number of tenement houses, especially in the lower part of the
city and along the eastern and western border. Disease especially
in the form of fevers of a typhoid character are constantly
present in these dwellings and every now and then become an
epidemic.[155]

"Some of the tenements," added the report, "are owned by persons of the
highest character, but they fail to appreciate the responsibility
resting on them." This sentence makes it clear that landlords could
own, and enormously profit from, pig-sty human habitations which killed
off a large number of the unfortunate tenants, and yet these landlords
could retain, in nowise diminished, the lustre of being men "of the
highest character." Fully one-third of the deaths in New York and
Brooklyn resulted from zymotic diseases contracted in these tenements,
yet not even a whisper was heard, not the remotest suggestion that the
men of wealth who thus deliberately profited from disease and death,
were criminally culpable, although faint and timorous opinions were
advanced that they might be morally responsible.

HUMANITY OF NO CONSEQUENCE.

Human life was nothing; the supremacy of the property idea dominated all
thought and all laws, not because mankind was callous to suffering,
wretchedness and legalized murder, bu