shall have learned the lesson that the unkindest thing that can be
done to a young tramp is to let him go on tramping, and when magistrates
shall blush to discharge him on the plea that "it is no crime to be poor
in this country," they will succeed, and the tramp also we shall then
have "druv into decency." When I look back now to the time, ten or
fifteen years ago, when, night after night, with every police station
filled, I found the old tenements in the "Bend" jammed with a reeking
mass of human wrecks that huddled in hall and yard, and slept, crouching
in shivering files, all the way up the stairs to the attic, it does seem
as if we had come a good way, and as if all the turmoil and the bruises
and the fighting had been worth while. New York is no longer, at least
when Tammany is out, a tramp's town. And that is so much gained, to us
and to the tramp.

CHAPTER VII

PIETRO AND THE JEW

We have seen that the problem of the tenement is to make homes for the
people, out of it if we can, in it if we must. Now about the tenant. How
much of a problem is he? And how are we to go about solving it?

The government "slum inquiry," of which I have spoken before, gave us
some facts about him. In New York it found 62.58 per cent of the
population of the slum to be foreign-born, whereas for the whole city
the percentage of foreigners was only 43.23. While the proportion of
illiteracy in all was only as 7.69 to 100, in the slum it was 46.65 per
cent. That with nearly twice as many saloons to a given number there
should be three times as many arrests in the slum as in the city at
large need not be attributed to nationality, except indirectly in its
possible responsibility for the saloons. I say "possible" advisably.
Anybody, I should think, whose misfortune it is to live in the slum
might be expected to find in the saloon a refuge. I shall not quarrel
with the other view of it. I am merely stating a personal impression.
The fact that concerns us here is the great proportion of the
foreign-born. Though the inquiry covered only a small section of a
tenement district, the result may be accepted as typical.

We shall not, then, have to do with an American element in discussing
this tenant, for even of the "natives" in the census, by far the largest
share is made up of the children of the immigrant. Indeed, in New York
only 4.77 per cent of the slum population canvassed were shown to be of
native parentage. The parents of 95