der Tenement House
Commission." Those results made for the health and happiness and safety
of a million and a half of souls, and were accounted, on every humane
ground, the longest step forward that had been taken by this community.
For the old absentee landlord, who did not know what mischief was afoot,
we have got the speculative builder, who does know, but does not care,
so long as he gets his pound of flesh. Half of the just laws that have
been passed for the relief of the people he has paralyzed with his
treacherous discretion clause, carefully nursed in the school of
practical politics to which he gives faithful adherence. The thing has
been the curse of our city from the day when the earliest struggle
toward better things began. Among the first manifestations of that was
the prohibition of soap factories below Grand Street by the Act of 1797,
which created a Board of Health with police powers. The act was passed
in February, to take effect in July; but long before that time the same
legislature had amended it by giving the authorities discretion in the
matter. And the biggest soap factory of them all is down there to this
day, and is even now stirring up a rumpus among the latest immigrants,
the Syrians, who have settled about it. No doubt it is all a question of
political education; but is not a hundred years enough to settle this
much, that compromise is out of place where the lives of the people are
at stake, and that it is time our years of "discretion" were numbered?

[Illustration: As a Solid Block of Double-deckers. Lawful until now,
would appear.]

At last there comes for the answer an emphatic yes. This year the law
has killed the discretionary clause and spoken out plainly. No more
stairs of wood; no more encroachment on the tenants' sunlight; and here,
set in its frame of swarming tenements, is a wide, open space, yet to be
a real park, with flowers and grass and birds to gladden the hearts of
those to whom such things have been as tales that are told, all these
dreary years, and with a playground in which the children of yonder big
school may roam at will, undismayed by landlord or policeman. Not all
the forces of reaction can put back the barracks that were torn down as
one of the "laughable results" of that very Tenement House Commission's
work, or restore to the undertaker his profits from Bone Alley of horrid
memory. It was the tenant's turn to laugh, that time. Half a dozen
blocks away, among ev