whenever a step was taken to arraign them before the bar of public
opinion. No winter has passed, since the awakening conscience of the
people of New York City manifested itself in a desire to better the lot
of the other half, that has not seen an assault made, in one shape or
another, on the structure of tenement-house law built up with such
anxious solicitude. Once a bill to exempt from police supervision, by
withdrawing them from the tenement-house class, the very worst of the
houses, whose death-rate threatened the community, was sneaked through
the legislature all unknown, and had reached the executive before the
alarm was sounded. The Governor, put upon his guard, returned the bill,
with the indorsement that he was unable to understand what could have
prompted a measure that seemed to have reason and every argument against
it and none for it.

But the motive is not so obscure, after all. It is the same old one of
profit without conscience. It took from the Health Department the
supervision of the light, ventilation, and plumbing of the tenements,
which by right belonged there, and put it in charge of a compliant
Building Department, "for the convenience of architects and their
clients, and the saving of time and expense to them." For the
convenience of the architect's client, the builder, the lot was
encroached upon, until of one big block which the Gilder Commission
measured only 7 per cent was left open to the air; 93 per cent of it was
covered with brick and mortar. Rear tenements, to the number of nearly
100, have been condemned as "slaughter-houses," with good reason, but
this block was built practically solid. The average of space covered in
34 tenement blocks was shown to be 78.13 per cent. The law allowed only
65. The "discretion" that penned tenants in a burning tenement with
stairs of wood for the builder's "convenience" cut down the chance of
life of their babies unmoved. Sunlight and air mean just that, where
three thousand human beings are packed into a single block. That was why
the matter was given into the charge of the health officials, when
politics was yet kept out of their work.

[Illustration: The Old Style of Tenements, with Yards.]

Of such kind are the interests that oppose betterment of the worker's
hard lot in New York, that dictated the appointment by Tammany of a
commission composed of builders to revise its code of tenement laws, and
that sneered at the "laughable results of the Gil