ne in every five babies had to die; that is to say, the house killed
it. No wonder the Gilder commission styled the rear tenements
"slaughter-houses," and called upon the legislature to root them out,
and with them every old, ramshackle, disease-breeding tenement in the
city.

[Footnote 20: That was, however, a reduction of 236 since 1898, when
the census showed 2379 rear houses.]

[Footnote 21: Report of Gilder Tenement House Commission, 1894.]

A law which is in substance a copy of the English act for destroying
slum property was passed in the spring of 1895. It provided for the
seizure of buildings that were dangerous to the public health or unfit
for human habitation, and their destruction upon proper proof, with
compensation to the owner on a sliding scale down to the point of entire
unfitness, when he might claim only the value of the material in his
house. Up to that time, the only way to get rid of such a house had been
to declare it a nuisance under the sanitary code; but as the city could
not very well pay for the removal of a nuisance, to order it down seemed
too much like robbery; so the owner was allowed to keep it. It takes
time and a good many lives to grow a sentiment such as this law
expressed. The Anglo-Saxon respect for vested rights is strong in us
also. I remember going through a ragged school in London, once, and
finding the eyes of the children in the infant class red and sore.
Suspecting some contagion, I made inquiries, and was told that a collar
factory next door was the cause of the trouble. The fumes from it
poisoned the children's eyes.

[Illustration: Richard Watson Gilder, Chairman of the Tenement House
Commission of 1894.]

"And you allow it to stay, and let this thing go on?" I asked, in
wonder.

The superintendent shrugged his shoulders. "It is their factory," he
said.

I was on the point of saying something that might not have been polite,
seeing that I was a guest, when I remembered that, in the newspaper
which I carried in my pocket, I had just been reading a plea of some
honorable M. P. for a much-needed reform in the system of counsel fees,
then being agitated in the House of Commons. The reply of the solicitor
general had made me laugh. He was inclined to agree with the honorable
member, but still preferred to follow precedent by referring the matter
to the Inns of Court. Quite incidentally, he mentioned that the matter
had been hanging fire in the House two h