In New York, the youngest of the world's great cities, that time came later than elsewhere, because the crowding had not been so great. Greed and reckless selfishness wrought like results here as in the cities of older lands. Those very places and domiciles, and all that are like them, are to-day nurseries of crime, and of the vices and disorderly courses which lead to crime. It is ten years and over, now, since that line divided New York's population evenly. The fifteen thousand tenant houses that were the despair of the sanitarian in the past generation have swelled into thirty-seven thousand, and more than twelve hundred thousand persons call them home.
Nothing is left but to make the best of a bad bargain.
What the tenements are and how they grow to what they are, we shall see hereafter. The story is dark enough, drawn from the plain public records, to send a chill to any heart. This is their worst crime, inseparable from the system. It was asked once of our city in taunting defiance by a band of political cutthroats, the legitimate outgrowth of life on the tenement-house level. It will depend on how fully the situation that prompted the challenge is grasped.