nd stood their ground on its letter, paying the
owners the bare cost of the old timbers.

As in every other instance, we seized only the rear houses at the
Barracks; but within a year or two the front houses were also sold and
destroyed too, and so disappeared quite the worst rookery that was left
on Manhattan Island. Those of us who had explored it with the "midnight
police" in its worst days had no cause to wonder at its mortality. In
Berlin they found the death-rate per thousand to be 163.5 where a family
occupied one room, 22.5 where it lived in two rooms, 7.5 in the case of
three-room dwellers, and 5.4 where they had four rooms.[22] Does any one
ask yet why we fight the slum in Berlin and New York? The Barracks in
those days suggested the first kind.

[Footnote 22: "Municipal Government in Continental Europe," by
Albert Shaw.]

I have said before that I do not believe in paying the slum landlord for
taking his hand off our throats, when we have got the grip on him in
turn. Mr. Roger Foster, who as a member of the Tenement House Committee
drew the law, and as counsel for the Health Department fought the
landlords successfully in the courts, holds to the opposite view. I am
bound to say that instances turned up in which it did seem a hardship to
deprive the owners of even such property. I remember especially a
tenement in Roosevelt Street, which was the patrimony and whole estate
of two children. With the rear house taken away, the income from the
front would not be enough to cover the interest on the mortgage. It was
one of those things that occasionally make standing upon abstract
principle so very uncomfortable. I confess I never had the courage to
ask what was done in their case. I know that the tenement went, and I
hope--well, never mind what I hope. It has nothing to do with the case.
The house is down, and the main issue decided upon its merits.

In the 94 tenements (counting the front houses in; they cannot be
separated from the rear tenements in the death registry) there were in
five years 956 deaths, a rate of 62.9 at a time when the general city
death-rate was 24.63. It was the last and heaviest blow aimed at the
abnormal mortality of a city that ought, by reason of many advantages,
to be one of the healthiest in the world. With clean streets, pure milk,
medical school inspection, antitoxin treatment of deadly diseases, and
better sanitary methods generally; with the sunlight let into its slums,