tself by the throat.

Three years ago, speaking of it as the one thing that was in the way of
progress in New York, I wrote: "It will continue to be in the way. A man
who has one lot will build on it; it is his right. The state, which
taxes his lot, has no right to confiscate it by forbidding him to make
it yield him an income, on the plea that he might build something which
would be a nuisance. But it can so order the building that it shall not
be a nuisance; that is not only its right, but its duty."

[Illustration: The Riverside Tenements in Brooklyn.]

That duty has been done since; let me tell how. Popular sentiment,
taking more and more firmly hold of the fact that there is a direct
connection between helpless poverty and bad housing, shaped itself in
1898 into a volunteer Tenement House Committee which, as an effective
branch of the Charity Organization Society, drew up and presented to the
municipal authorities a reform code of building ordinances affecting the
dwellings of the poor. But Tammany was back, and they would not listen
at the City Hall. Seeing which, the committee made up its mind to appeal
to the people themselves in such fashion that it should be heard. That
was the way the Tenement House Exhibition of the winter of 1900 came
into existence.

Rich and poor came to see that speaking record of a city's sorry plight,
and at last we all understood. Not to understand after one look at the
poverty and disease maps that hung on the wall was to declare oneself a
dullard. The tenements were all down in them, with the size of them and
the air space within, if there was any. Black dots upon the poverty maps
showed that for each one five families in that house had applied for
charity within a given time. There were those that had as many as
fifteen of the ominous marks, showing that seventy-five families had
asked aid from the one house. To find a tenement free from the taint one
had to search long and with care. Upon the disease maps the scourge of
tuberculosis lay like a black pall over the double-decker districts. A
year later the State Commission, that continued the work then begun,
said: "There is hardly a tenement house in which there has not been at
least one case of pulmonary tuberculosis within the last five years, and
in some houses there have been as many as twenty-two different cases of
this terrible disease. There are over 8000 deaths a year in New York
City from this disease alone, at least 20