t because thought and law
represented what the propertied interests demanded. If the proletarian
white population had been legal slaves, as the negroes in the South had
been, much consideration would have been bestowed upon their gullets and
domiciles, for then they would have been property; and who ever knew the
owner of property to destroy the article which represented money? But
being "free" men and women and children, the proletarians were simply so
many bundles of flesh whose sickness and death meant pecuniary loss to
no property-holder. Therefore casualities to them were a matter of no
great concern to a society that was taught to venerate the sacredness of
property as embodied in brick and stone walls, clothes, machines, and
furniture, which same, if inert, had the all-important virile quality of
having a cash value, which the worker had not.

But these landlords "of the highest character" not only owned, and
regularly collected rents from, tenement houses which filled the
cemeteries, but they also resorted to the profitable business of leasing
certain tenements to middlemen who guaranteed them by lease a definite
and never-failing annual rental. Once having done this, the landlords
did not care what the middlemen did--how much rent they exacted, or in
what condition they allowed the tenements. "The middlemen," further
reported the Metropolitan Board of Health,

are frequently of the most heartless and unscrupulous character
and make large profits by sub-letting. They leave no space
unoccupied: they rent sheds, basements and even cellars to
families and lodgers; they divide rooms by partitions, and then
place a whole family in a single room, to be used for living,
cooking, and sleeping purposes. In the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh,
Tenth, and Fourteenth Wards may be found large, old fashioned
dwellings originally constructed for one family, subdivided and
sublet to such an extent that even the former sub-cellars are
occupied by two or more families. There is a cellar population of
not less than 20,000 in New York City.

Here, again, shines forth with blinding brightness that superior
morality of the propertied classes. There is no record of a single
landlord who refused to pocket the great gains from the ownership of
tenement houses. Great, in fact, excessive gains they were, for the
landowning class considered tenements "magnificent investments" (how
edifying a