The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1875-07-29

|
Children are dying in this city at the rate
OF one hundred day and everybody who
mas child for whose life he cares, and who
can get that child out of the city, had better
90 SO without loss of time for the conditions
on which this dreadful mortality depends will
not get better, but worse, as the season ad-
Vances and the sitting nights of August
ana the malariops vapors of September make
tne city sleeping rooms, in the packed dis
trlcts, mere watts of mephitic and destructive
gases.
There is no mystery IN regard to this mas
sacre OF the innocents. It's causes are known
to all who care to consider them: and we
have done our utmost to attract to them such
degree of public attention as would compel
the authorities to take action. But the atten
| ton of the authorities cannot be distracted
from their operations on the public till by
| any ordinary means in these days. Fellows
with their arms up to the elbows in the public
| treasury, each anxious to fill his private
wheelbarrow, cannot be induced to consider
any fact that makes no other appeal to their
attention than that of humanity or duty; and
30 the causes continue in virtue of which GER
tain parts of the city are in pestilential
condition.
Strange, indeed, are the operations in cases
of this nature of what we may call fashion.
If the one hundged little children who are
dying every day in this city-one for every
quarter of an hour-were returned by the
doctors as cases of cholera or yellow fever
there would be q panic, almost revolution
but when on say that they are dying of the
Harlem flats and causes of that nature, which
is the plain truth of the case, it is treated
with indifference and incredulity, and the
authorities are encouraged in their indiffer-
ence. Yet cholera is mainly disseminated
from person to person but the malady of
the Harlem flats is carried on thetbreeze that
blows in at every mans window
UNCLAIMED streets, and alleys and courts
reeking with heaps of decaying matter on the
surface contract-made sewers that are mere
wells for the reception and confinement of the
filth washed down from the streets and
houses, and which by the ingeniously con-
trived pipes discharge their worst gases into
the rooms the Harlem flats, where. by the
deposit of decaying organic matter a vast
putrid surface is exposed to the sun and is
contrived to produce disease just as the gar
dener's hotbed is contrived to produce his
early plants the absence of market system
which leaves the corner groceries to supply
with withered vegetables and unripe fruit the
people who cannot choose but take them the
c. &c h. - n,
for recording what has occurred, and the in
sufficient restraint upon the practice of medi-
cine by unqualified persons, which leaves the
people a prey to an army of incapable doc
tors, with and without diplomas, who are, in
simple truth, not less dangerous in house
than the worst diseases that come there
these are the causes of the trouble.
The authorities are not to blame for the in
capable doctors; that fault is due to our So
cial and political system, which is based upon
the erroneous notion that the people are them
selves the best judges in all cases of such a
quasi private nature as the employment of
doctors But for all the other causes the au-
thorities are directly responsible. The Mayor,
the Comptroller the Police Board, and the
worse than incapable Board of Health, these
are all to blame for condition of things that
imperils and will imperil for every day of the
summer the life of every poor mans child;
for the rich can leave-the poor must stand
and take it. There never was such pitiful
farce in government as the Board of Health,
whose view of things may be measured by the
statement of its president, that if ne could get
the money out of the Comptroller he could
remedy the trouble of the Harlem flats in
''about ninety days." or by the time the
cool weather comes on. But, perhaps
the worst source of mischief is the
Comptroller, who has crippled every
department of the municipal adj
ministraton by establishing the principle
that no payment can be made without law
suit. But what do any of these men care for
the six thousand children of the poor whose
lives will this summer pay the penalty of their
ambitious or mercenary misconduct?