hich she
well knew her family would not be admitted; the landlord was particular.
She knocked, with a troubled face, alone. Yes, the flat was to let; had
she any children? The woman heaved a sigh. "Six, but they are all in
Greenwood." The landlord's heart was touched by such woe. He let her
have the flat. By night he was amazed to find a flock of half a dozen
robust youngsters domiciled under his roof. They had indeed been in
Greenwood; but they had come back from the cemetery to stay. And stay
they did, the rent being paid.

High rents, slack work, and low wages go hand in hand in the tenements
as promoters of overcrowding. The rent is always one-fourth of the
family income, often more. The fierce competition for a bare living
cuts down wages; and when loss of work is added, the only thing left is
to take in lodgers to meet the landlord's claim. The Jew usually takes
them singly, the Italian by families. The midnight visit of the sanitary
policeman discloses a state of affairs against which he feels himself
helpless. He has his standard: 400 cubic feet of air space for each
adult sleeper, 200 for a child. That in itself is a concession to the
practical necessities of the case. The original demand was for 600 feet.
But of 28,000 and odd tenants canvassed in New York, in the slumming
investigation prosecuted by the general government in 1894, 17,047 were
found to have less than 400 feet, and of these 5526 slept in
unventilated rooms with no windows. No more such rooms have been added
since; but there has come that which is worse.

It was the boast of New York, till a few years ago, that at least that
worst of tenement depravities, the one-room house, too familiar in the
English slums, was practically unknown here. It is not so any longer.
The evil began in the old houses in Orchard and Allen streets, a bad
neighborhood, infested by fallen women and the thievish rascals who prey
upon their misery,--a region where the whole plan of humanity, if plan
there be in this disgusting mess, jars out of tune continually. The
furnished-room house has become an institution here, speeded on by a
conscienceless Jew who bought up the old buildings as fast as they came
into the market, and filled them with a class of tenants before whom
charity recoils, helpless and hopeless. When the houses were filled, the
crowds overflowed into the yard. In one, I found, in midwinter, tenants
living in sheds built of odd boards and roof tin, and payi