|
|
DOWN below Chatham Square, in the old Fourth Ward, where the cradle of the tenement stood, we shall find New York's Other Half at home, receiving such as care to call and are not afraid. Not all of it, to be sure, there is not room for that; but a fairly representative gathering, representative of its earliest and worst traditions. There is nothing to be afraid of. In this metropolis, let it be understood, there is no public street where the stranger may not go safely by day and by night, provided he knows how to mind his own business and is sober. His coming and going will excite little interest, unless he is suspected
|
|
of being a truant officer, in which case he will be impressed with the truth of the observation that the American stock is dying out for want of children. If he escapes this suspicion and the risk of trampling upon, or being himself run down by the bewildering swarms of youngsters that are everywhere or nowhere as the exigency and their quick scent of danger direct, he will see no reason for dissenting from that observation. Glimpses caught of the parents watching the youngsters
play from windows or open doorways will soon convince
him that the native stock is in no way involved.
Leaving the Elevated Railroad where it dives under
the Brooklyn Bridge at Franklin Square, scarce a dozen
steps will take us where we wish to go. With its rush
and roar echoing yet in our ears, we have turned the
corner from prosperity to poverty We stand upon the
domain of the tenement. In the shadow of the great
stone abutments the old Knickerbocker houses linger
like ghosts of a departed day. Down the winding slope
of Cherry Street--proud and fashionable Cherry Hill
that was--their broad steps, sloping roofs, and dormer
windows are easily made out; all the more easily for
the contrast with the ugly barracks that elbow them
right and left. These never had other design than
to shelter at as little outlay as possible, the greatest
crowds out of which rent could be wrung. |
|
They were the bad after-thought
of a heedless day. The years have brought to the
old houses unhonored age, a querulous second childhood
that is out of tune with the time, their tenants,
the neighbors, and cries out against them and
against you in fretful protest in every step on
their rotten floors or squeaky stairs. Good cause
have they for their fretting. This one, with its
shabby front and poorly patched roof, what glowing
firesides, what happy children may it once have
owned? Heavy feet, too often with unsteady step,
for the pot-house is next door--where is it not
next door in these slums?--have worn away the
brown-stone steps since; the broken columns at
the door have rotted away at the base. Of the
handsome cornice barely a trace is left. Dirt
and desolation reign in the wide hallway, and
danger lurks on the stairs. Rough pine boards
fence off the roomy fire-places--where coal is
bought by the pail at the rate of twelve dollars
a ton these have no place. The arched gateway
leads no longer to a shady bower on the banks
of the rushing stream, inviting to day-dreams
with its gentle repose, but to a dark and nameless alley, shut in by high brick walls, cheerless
as the lives of those they shelter. The wolf knocks
loudly at the gate in the troubled dreams that
come to this alley, echoes of the day's cares. |
|
|
A horde of dirty children play about the dripping
hydrant, the only thing in the alley that thinks
enough of its chance to make the most of it: it
is the best it can do. These are the children
of the tenements, the growing generation of the
slums; this their home. From the great highway
overhead, along which throbs the life-tide of
two great cities, one might drop a pebble into
half a dozen such alleys. One yawns just across the street; not
very broadly, but it is not to blame. The builder of
the old gateway had no thought of its ever becoming
a public thoroughfare. Once inside it widens, but only
to make room for a big box-like building with the worn
and greasy look of the slum tenement that is stamped
alike on the houses and their tenants down here, even
on the homeless cur that romps with the children in
yonder building lot, with an air of expectant interest
plainly betraying the forlorn hope that at some stage
of the game a meat-bone may show up in the role of "It."
Vain hope, truly ! Nothing more appetizing than a bare-legged
ragamuffin appears. Meat-bones, not long since picked
clean, are as scarce in Blind Man's Alley as elbow-room
in any Fourth Ward back-yard. The shouts of the children
come hushed over the housetops, as if apologizing for
the intrusion. Few glad noises make this old alley ring.
Morning and evening it echoes with the gentle, groping
tap of the blind man's staff as he feels his way to
the street. Blind Man's Alley bears its name for a reason.
Until little more than a year ago its dark burrows harbored
a colony of blind beggars, tenants of a blind landlord,
old Daniel Murphy, whom every child in the ward knows,
if he never heard of the President of the United States.
"Old Dan" made a big fortune--he told me once
four hundred thousand dollars--out of his alley and
the surrounding tenements, only to grow blind himself
in extreme old age, sharing in the end the chief hardship
of the wretched beings whose lot he had stubbornly refused
to better that he might increase his wealth. Even when
the Board of Health at last compelled him to repair
and clean up the worst of the old buildings, under threat
of driving out the tenants and locking the doors behind
them, the work was accomplished against the old man's
angry protests. He appeared in person before the Board
to argue his case, and his argument was characteristic. |
|
"I have made my will," he said. "My
monument stands waiting for me in Calvary. I
stand on the very brink of the grave, blind
and helpless, and now (here the pathos of the
appeal was swept under in a burst of angry indignation)
do you want me to build and get skinned, skinned?
These people are not fit to live in a nice house.
Let them go where they can, and let my house
stand."
In spite of the genuine anguish of the appeal,
it was downright amusing to find that his anger
was provoked less by the anticipated waste of
luxury on his tenants than by distrust of his
own kind, the builder. He knew intuitively what
to expect. The result showed that Mr. Murphy
had gauged his tenants correctly. The cleaning
up process apparently destroyed the home-feeling
of the alley; many of the blind people moved
away and did not return. Some remained, however,
and the name has clung to the place.
|
|
Some idea of what is meant by a sanitary "cleaning
up" in these slums may be gained from the
account of a mishap I met with once, in taking
a flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars
in one of the tenements down here. With unpractised
hands I managed to set fire to the house. When
the blinding effect of the flash had passed
away and I could see once more, I discovered
that a lot of paper and rags that hung on the
wall were ablaze. There were six of us, five
blind men and women who knew nothing of their
danger, and myself, in an attic room with a
dozen crooked, rickety stairs between us and
the street, and as many households as helpless
as the one whose guest I was all about us. The
thought: how were they ever to be got out? made
my blood run cold as I saw the flames creeping
up the wall, and my first impulse was to bolt
for the street and shout for help. The next
was to smother the fire myself, and I did, with
a vast deal of trouble.
Afterward, when I came down to the street
I told a friendly policeman of my trouble. For some
reason he thought it rather a good joke, and laughed
immoderately at my concern lest even then sparks should
be burrowing in the rotten wall that might yet break
out in flame and destroy the house with all that were
in it. He told me why, when he found time to draw breath.
"Why, don't you know," he said, "that
house is the Dirty Spoon? It caught fire six times last
winter, but it wouldn't burn. The dirt was so thick
on the walls, it smothered the fire!" Which, if
true, shows that water and dirt, not usually held to
be harmonious elements, work together for the good of
those who insure houses. |
|
Sunless and joyless
though it be, Blind Man's Alley has that which
its compeers of the slums vainly yearn for. It
has a pay-day. Once a year sunlight shines into
the lives of its forlorn crew, past and present.
In June, when the Superintendent of Out-door Poor
distributes the twenty thousand dollars annually
allowed the poor blind by the city, in half-hearted
recognition of its failure to otherwise provide
for them, Blindman's Alley takes a day off and
goes to "see" Mr. Blake. That night
it is noisy with unwonted merriment. There is
scraping of squeaky fiddles in the dark rooms,
and cracked old voices sing long-forgotten songs.
Even the blind landlord rejoices, for much of
the money goes into his coffers.From their perch
up among the rafters Mrs. Gallagher's blind boarders
might hear, did they listen, the tramp of the
policeman always on duty in Gotham Courts half
a stone's throw away. His beat, though it takes
in but a small portion of a single block, is quite
as lively as most larger patrol rounds. A double
row of five-story tenements back to back under
a common roof, extending |
|
back from the street
two hundred and thirty-four feet, with barred
openings in the dividing wall, so that the tenants
may see but cannot get at each other from the
stairs, makes the "court." Alleys--one
wider by a couple of feet than the other, whence
the distinction Single and Double Alley--skirt
the barracks on either side.
Such, briefly, is the tenement that has challenged
public attention more than any other in the whole
city and tested the power of sanitary law and
rule for forty years. The name of the pile is
not down in the City Directory, but in the public
records it holds an unenviable place. It was here
the mortality rose during the last great cholera
epidemic to the unprecedented rate of 195 in 1,000
inhabitants. In its worst days a full thousand
could not be packed into the court, though the
number did probably not fall far short of it.
Even now, under the management of men of conscience,
and an agent, a King's Daughter, whose practical
energy, kindliness and good sense have done much to redeem its foul reputation,
the swarms it shelters would make more than one fair-sized
country village. The mixed character of the population,
by this time about equally divided between the Celtic
and the Italian stock, accounts for the iron bars and
the policeman. It was an eminently Irish suggestion
that the latter was to be credited to the presence of
two German families in the court, who "made trouble
all the time." A Chinaman whom I questioned as
he hurried past the iron gate of the alley, put the
matter in a different light. " Lem Ilish velly
bad," he said. Gotham Court has been the entering
wedge for the Italian element, who until recently had
not attained a foothold in the Fourth Ward, but are
now trailing across Chatham Street from their stronghold
in "the Bend" in ever increasing numbers,
seeking, according to their wont, the lowest level. |
|
It is curious to find that this notorious block,
whose name was so long synonymous with all that
was desperately bad, was originally built (in
1851) by a benevolent Quaker for the express
purpose of rescuing the poor people from the
dreadful rookeries they were then living in.
How long it continued a model tenement is not
on record. It could not have been very long,
for already in 1862, ten years after it was
finished, a sanitary official counted 146 cases
of sickness in the court, including "all
kinds of infectious disease," from small-pox
down, and reported that of 138 children born
in it in less than three years 61 had died,
mostly before they were one year old. Seven
years later the inspector of the district reported
to the Board of Health that "nearly ten
per cent. of the population is sent to the public
hospitals each year." When the alley was
finally taken in hand by the authorities, and,
as a first step toward its reclamation, the
entire population was driven out by the police,
experience dictated, as one of the first improvements
to be made, the putting in of a kind of sewer-grating,
so constructed, as the official report patiently
puts it, "as to prevent the ingress of
persons |
|
disposed to make a hiding-place"
of the sewer and the cellars into which they
opened. The fact was that the big vaulted sewers
had long been a runway for thieves--the Swamp
Angels--who through them easily escaped when
chased by the police, as well as a storehouse
for their plunder.
The sewers are there to-day; in fact
the two alleys are nothing but the roofs of
these enormous tunnels in which a man may walk
upright the full distance of the block and into
the Cherry Street sewer--if he likes the fun
and is not afraid of rats. Could their grimy
walls speak, the big canals might tell many
a startling tale. But they are silent enough,
and 80 are most of those whose secrets they
might betray. The flood-gates connecting with
the Cherry Street main are closed now, except
when the water is drained off. Then there were
no gates, and it is on record that the sewers
were chosen as a short cut habitually by residents
of the court whose business lay on the line of them, near a manhole, perhaps, in Cherry
Street, or at the river mouth of the big pipe when
it was clear at low tide. "Me Jimmy," said
one wrinkled old dame, who looked in while we were
nosing about under Double Alley, "he used to
go to his work along down Cherry Street that way every
morning and come back at night." The associations
must have been congenial. Probably "Jimmy"
himself fitted into the landscape.
Half-way back from the street in this latter alley
is a tenement, facing the main building, on the west
side of the way, that was not originally part of the
court proper. It stands there a curious monument to
a Quaker's revenge, a living illustration of the power
of hate to perpetuate its bitter fruit beyond the
grave. The lot upon which it is built was the property
of John Wood, brother of Silas, the builder of Gotham
Court. He sold the Cherry Street front to a man who
built upon it a tenement with entrance only from the
street. Mr. Wood afterward quarrelled about the partition
line with his neighbor, Alderman Mulling, who had
put up a long tenement barrack on his lot after the
style of the Court, and the Alderman knocked him down.
Tradition records that the Quaker picked himself up
with the quiet remark, "I will pay thee for that,
friend Alderman," and went his way. His manner
of paying was to put up the big building in the rear
of 34 Cherry Street with an immense blank wall right
in front of the windows of Alderman Mullins's tenements,
shutting out effectually light and air from them. |
|
But as he had no access to the street from
his building for many years it could not be
let or used for anything, and remained vacant
until it passed under the management of the
Gotham Court property. Mullins's Court is there
yet, and so is the Quaker's vengeful wall that
has cursed the lives of thousands of innocent
people since. At its farther end the alley between
the two that begins inside the Cherry Street
tenement, six or seven feet wide, narrows down
to less than two feet. It is barely possible
to squeeze through; but few care to do it, for
the rift leads to the jail of the Oak Street
police station, and therefore is not popular
with the growing youth of the district.
There is crape on the door of the Alderman's
court as we pass out, and upstairs in one of
the tenements preparations are making for a
wake. A man lies dead in the hospital who was
cut to pieces in a "can racket" |
|
in
the alley on Sunday. The sway of the excise
law is not extended to these back alleys. It
would matter little if it were. There are secret
by-ways, and some it is not held worth while
to keep secret, along which the "growler"
wanders at all hours and all seasons unmolested.
It climbed the stairs so long and so often that
day that murder resulted. It is nothing unusual
on Cherry Street, nothing to "make a fuss"
about. Not a week before, two or three blocks
up the street, the police felt called upon to
interfere in one of these can rackets at two
o'clock in the morning, to secure peace for
the neighborhood. The interference took the
form of a general fusillade, during which one
of the disturbers fell off the roof and was
killed. There was the usual wake and nothing
more was heard of it. What, indeed, was there
to say?
The "Rock of Ages" is the name over
the door of a low saloon that blocks the entrance to another alley, if possible more forlorn and dreary
than the rest, as we pass out of the Alderman's court.
It sounds like a jeer from the days, happily past,
when the "wickedest man in New York" lived
around the corner a little way and boasted of his
title. One cannot take many steps in Cherry Street
without encountering some relic of past or present
prominence in the ways of crime, scarce one that does
not turn up specimen bricks of the coming thief. The
Cherry Street tough is all-pervading. Ask Superintendent
Murray, who, as captain of the Oak Street squad, in
seven months secured convictions for theft, robbery,
and murder aggregating no less than five hundred and
thirty years of penal servitude, and he will tell
you his opinion that the Fourth Ward, even in the
last twenty years, has turned out more criminals than
all the rest of the city together. |
|
But though the "Swamp
Angels" have gone to their reward, their
successors carry on business at the old stand
as successfully if not as boldly. There goes one
who was once a shining light in thiefdom. He has
reformed since, they say. The policeman on the
corner, who is addicted to a professional unbelief
in reform of any kind, will tell you that while
on the Island once he sailed away on a shutter,
paddling along until he was picked up in Hell
Gate by a schooner's crew, whom he persuaded that
he was a fanatic performing some sort of religious
penance by his singular expedition. Over yonder,
Tweed, the arch-thief, worked in a brush-shop
and earned an honest living before he took to
politics. As we stroll from one narrow street
to another the odd contrast between the low, old-looking
houses in front and the towering tenements in
the back yards grows even more striking, perhaps
because we expect and are looking for it. Nobody
who was not would suspect the presence of the
rear houses, though they have been there long
enough. Here is one seven stories high behind
one with only three floors. Take a look into this
Roosevelt |
|
Street alley; just about one step wide, with a five-story house on one side that gets
its light and air--God help us for pitiful mockery!--from
this slit between brick walls. There are no windows
in the wall on the other side; it is perfectly
blank. The fire-escapes of the long tenement fairly
touch it; but the rays of the sun, rising, setting,
or at high noon, never do. It never shone into
the alley from the day the devil planned and man
built it. There was once an English doctor who
experimented with the sunlight in the soldiers'
barracks, and found that on the side that was
shut off altogether from the sun the mortality
was one hundred per cent. greater than on the
light side, where its rays had free access. But
then soldiers are of some account, have a fixed
value, if not a very high one. The people who live
here have not. The horse that pulls the dirt-cart
one of these laborers loads and unloads is of ever
so much more account to the employer of his labor
than he and all that belongs to him. Ask the owner;
he will not attempt to deny it, if the horse is worth
anything. The man too knows it. It is the one thought
that occasionally troubles the owner of the horse
in the enjoyment of his prosperity, built of and upon
the successful assertion of the truth that all men
are created equal.
With what a shock did the story of yonder Madison
Street alley come home to New Yorkers one morning,
eight or ten years ago, when a fire that broke out
after the men had gone to their work swept up those
narrow stairs and burned up women and children to
the number of a full half score. There were fire-escapes,
yes! but so placed that they could not be reached.
The firemen had to look twice before they could find
the opening that passes for a thoroughfare; a stout
man would never venture in. Some wonderfully heroic
rescues were made at that fire by people living in
the adjoining tenements. Danger and trouble--of the
imminent kind, not the everyday sort that excites
neither interest nor commiseration--run even this
common clay into heroic moulds on occasion; occasions
that help us to remember that the gap that separates
the man with the patched coat from his wealthy neighbor
is, after all, perhaps but a tenement. Yet, what a
gap! and of whose making? Here, as we stroll along
Madison Street, workmen are busy putting the finishing
touches to the brown-stone front of a tall new tenement.
This one will probably be called an apartment house.
They are carving satyrs' heads in the stone, with
a crowd of gaping youngsters looking on in admiring wonder. Next door are two other tenements, likewise
with brown-stone fronts, fair to look at. The youngest
of the children in the group is not too young to remember
how their army of tenants was turned out by the health
officers because the houses had been condemned as
unfit for human beings to live in. The owner was a
wealthy builder who "stood high in the community."
Is it only in our fancy that the sardonic leer on
the stone faces seems to list that way? Or is it an
introspective grin? We will not ask if the new house
belongs to the same builder. He too may have reformed. |
|
We have crossed the boundary of the Seventh
Ward. Penitentiary Row, suggestive name for
a block of Cherry Street tenements, is behind
us. Within recent days it has become peopled
wholly with Hebrews, the overflow from Jewtown
adjoining, pedlars and tailors, all of them.
It is odd to read this legend from other days
over the door: "No pedlars allowed in this
house." These thrifty people are not only
crowding into the tenements of this once exclusive
district--they are buying them. The Jew runs
to real estate as soon as he can save up enough
for a deposit to clinch the bargain. As fast
as the old houses are torn down, towering structures
go up in their place, and Hebrews are found
to be the builders. Here is a whole alley nicknamed
after the intruder, Jews' Alley. But abuse and
ridicule are not weapons to fight the Israelite
with. He pockets them quietly with the rent
and bides his time. He knows from experience,
both sweet and bitter, that all things come
to those who wait, including the houses and
lands of their persecutors.
|
|
Here comes a pleasure party, as gay as any
on the avenue, though the carry-all is an ash-cart.
The father is the driver and he has taken his
brown-legged boy for a ride. How proud and happy
they both look up there on their perch! The
queer old building they have halted in front
of is "The Ship," famous for fifty
years as a ramshackle tenement filled with the
oddest crowd. No one knows why it is called
"The Ship," though there is a tradition
that once the river came clear up here to Hamilton
Street, and boats were moored along-side it.
More likely it is because it is as bewildering
inside as a crazy old ship, with its ups and
downs of ladders parading as stairs and its
unexpected pitfalls. But Hamilton Street, like
Water Street, is not what it was. The missions
drove from the latter the worst of its dives.
A sailors' mission has lately made its appearance
in Hamilton Street, but there are no dives there,
nothing worse than the ubiquitous saloon and
tough tenements.
Enough of them everywhere. Suppose we look
into one ? No.--Cherry Street. Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and
you might stumble over the children pitching pennies
back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs
are their daily diet. They have little else. Here where
the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a step,
and another, another. A flight of stairs. You can feel
your way, if you cannot see it. Close? Yes! What would
you have? All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs
comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming, and
from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn receive
from the stairs their sole supply of the elements God
meant to be free, but man deals out with such niggardly
hand. That was a woman filling her pail by the hydrant
you just bumped against. The sinks are in the hallway,
that all the tenants may have access--and all be poisoned
alike by their summer stenches. Hear the pump squeak!
It is the lullaby of tenement-house babes. In summer,
when a thousand thirsty throats pant for a cooling drink
in this block, it is worked in vain. But the saloon,
whose open door you passed in the hall, is always there.
The smell of it has followed you up. Here is a door.
Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless
wail--what do they mean? They mean that the soiled bow
of white you saw on the door downstairs will have another
story to tell--Oh! a sadly familiar story--before the
day is at an end. The child is dying with measles. With
half a chance it might have lived; but it had none.
That dark bedroom killed it. |
|
"It was took all of a suddint," says
the mother, smoothing the throbbing little body
with trembling hands. There is no unkindness
in the rough voice of the man in the jumper,
who sits by the window grimly smoking a clay
pipe, with the little life ebbing out in his
sight, bitter as his words sound: "Hush,
Mary ! If we cannot keep the baby, need we complain--such
as we?"
Such as we! What if the words ring in your
ears as we grope our way up the stairs and down
from floor to floor, listening to the sounds
behind the closed doors--some of quarrelling,
some of coarse songs, more of profanity. They
are true. When the summer heats come with their
suffering they have meaning more terrible than
words can tell. Come over here. Step carefully
over this baby--it is a baby, spite of its rags
and dirt--under these iron bridges called fire-escapes,
but loaded down, despite the incessant |
|
watchfulness
of the firemen, with broken household goods,
with wash-tubs and barrels, over which no man
could climb from a fire. This gap between dingy
brick-walls is the yard. That strip of smoke-colored
sky up there is the heaven of these people.
Do you wonder the name does not attract them
to the churches? That baby's parents live in
the rear tenement here. She is at least as clean
as the steps we are now climbing. There are
plenty of houses with half a hundred such in.
The tenement is much like the one in front we
just left, only fouler, closer, darker--we will not
say more cheerless. The word is a mockery. A hundred
thousand people lived in Tear tenements in New York
last year. Here is a room neater than the rest. The
woman, a stout matron with hard lines of care in her
face, is at the wash-tub. "I try to keep the childer
clean," she says, apologetically, but with a hopeless
glance around. The spice of hot soapsuds is added to
the air already tainted with the smell of boiling cabbage,
of rags and uncleanliness all about. It makes an overpowering
compound. It is Thursday, but patched linen is hung
upon the pulley-line from the window. There is no Monday
cleaning in the tenements. It is wash-day all the week
round, for a change of clothing is scarce among the
poor. They are poverty's honest badge, these perennial
lines of rags hung out to dry, those that are not the
washerwoman's professional shingle. The true line to
be drawn between pauperism and honest poverty is the
clothes-line. With it begins the effort to be clean
that is the first and the best evidence of a desire
to be honest.
What sort of an answer, think you, would come from
these tenements to the question "Is life worth
living?" were they heard at all in the discussion?
It may be that this, cut from the last report but
one of the Association for the Improvement of the
Condition of the Poor, a long name for a weary task,
has a suggestion of it: "In the depth of winter
the attention of the Association was called to a Protestant
family living in a garret in a miserable tenement
in Cherry Street. The family's condition was most
deplorable. The man, his wife, and three small children
shivering in one room through the roof of which the
pitiless winds of winter whistled. The room was almost
barren of furniture; the parents slept on the floor,
the elder children in boxes, and the baby was swung
in an old shawl attached to the rafters by cords by
way of a ham mock. The father, a seaman, had been
obliged to give up that calling because he was in
consumption, and was unable to provide either bread
or fire for his little ones."
Perhaps this may be put down as an exceptional case
but one that came to my notice some months ago in
a Seventh Ward tenement was typical enough to escape
that reproach. There were nine in the family: husband,
wife, an aged grandmother, and six children; honest,
hard working Germans, scrupulously neat, but poor.
All nine lived in two rooms, one about ten feet square
that served as parlor, bedroom, and eating-room, the
other a small hall-room made into a kitchen. The rent
was seven dollars and a half a month, more than a
week's wages for the husband and father, who was the
only bread-winner in the family. That day the mother
had thrown herself out of the window, and was carried
up from the street dead. She was "discouraged,"
said some of the other women from the tenement, who
had come in to look after the children while a messenger
carried the news to the father at the shop. They went
stolidly about their task, although they were evidently
not without feeling for the dead woman. No doubt she
was wrong in not taking life philosophically, as did
the four families a city missionary found housekeeping
in the four corners of one room. They got alone well
enough together until one of the families took a boarder
and made trouble. Philosophy, according to my optimistic
friend, naturally inhabits the tenements. The people
who live there come to look upon death in a different
way from the rest of us--do not take it as hard. He
has never found time to explain how the fact fits
into his general theory that life is not unbearable
in the tenements. Unhappily for the philosophy of
the slums, it is too apt to be of the kind that readily
recognizes the saloon, always handy, as the refuge
from every trouble, and shapes its practice according
to the discovery. |
|
Go to Chapter
5 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|