it had a population of 360 according to the record, and a
mortality of 75 per thousand!

[Illustration: An Old Wooster Street Court.]

The sketches of the Fourth Ward and Wooster Street barracks are
reproduced from an old report of the Association for Improving the
Condition of the Poor. They rightly made out, those early missionaries,
that the improvement must begin with the people's homes, or not at all,
and allowed no indifference on the part of the public to turn them from
their path. It is worth the while of Chicago and the other Western
cities that are growing with such joyful metropolitan ambitions, to
notice that their slums look to-day very much as New York's did then. In
fifty years how will it be? "The offspring of municipal neglect" the
Assembly Committee of 1857 called our "tenement-house" system.
"Forgetfulness of the poor" was the way a citizens' council put it. It
comes to the same thing. Whether seen from the point of view of the
citizen, the philanthropist, or the Christian, the slum is the poorest
investment a city can make, and once made it is not easily unmade. In a
Mississippi river town, when pleading for the turning over to the
people's use of some vacant land on the river-shore that would make a
fine breathing space, I was told that by and by they would consider it.
Just now it was too valuable for factory purposes. When the city had
grown opulent, in say twenty-five years, they would be willing to hand
it over. Fatal delusion! Men do not grow that kind of sense as they grow
rich. The land will be always "too valuable." When we in New York were
scandalized at last into making a park of the Mulberry Bend, it cost us
a million and a half, and it had made the slum a fixture, not to be
dislodged. No! the way to fight the slum is to head it off. It is like
fighting a fire. Chasing it up is hard and doubtful work; the chances
are that you will not overtake it till the house is burned down.

[Illustration: A Fourth Ward Colony in the Bad Old Days.]

There were those who thought when the Civil War was over, that a big
fire would not be the worst thing that could happen to New York; and,
if it could have burned sense into men's minds as it burned up the
evidence of their lack of it, they would have been right. But forty per
cent--the rent some of the barracks brought--is a powerful damper on
sense and conscience, even with the cholera at the door. However, the
fear of it gave us the Citizens' Council