JEWISH CHARITIES 71 



the city of New York and of the latter over 50 per cent reside 

 in one square mile of territory on the east side of the borough 

 of Manhattan. The recent agitation in regard to tenement 

 house legislation in New York is still too fresh in the minds of 

 students of this subject to require much further mention here. 

 It will be remarked, however, that in the campaign which 

 was made to preserve the vital features of the present tene- 

 ment house law, the Jewish residents on the east side of New 

 York were a unit in demanding that no drastic changes in the 

 law be made. Similarly at a recent municipal election, it 

 was the citizens and voters of this same district who rose en 

 masse and in a campaign that was startling in its uniqueness 

 and originality, purged their neighborhood of the vices and 

 immorality which existed there. And this brings us to the 

 point at issue. 



Whatever views the interested may have on this subject, 

 it can not be denied that there are limits to the housing of in- 

 dividuals in a restricted territory. Family Ufe can not be prop- 

 erly maintained without a certain amount of privacy, and one 

 of the essentials for the procurement of the latter is a suffi- 

 ciency of room. The danger to morals which lies in over- 

 crowding, is due primarily to the inability to carry on a 

 natural home life. The unit of society, after all, is the family, 

 and the preservation of the latter means the preservation of 

 the social fabric. With this thought in mind, it is not difficult 

 to imderstand how a people, who through the ages have been 

 heralded as the champions of purity m the home, have through 

 the conditions under which they live, taken on some of the 

 attributes of their surroundings and absorbed some of the 

 deteriorating effects of their environment. The natural con- 

 comitants of overcrowding are disease and vice and crime. 

 The Jew's power of assimilation is proverbial. It is but nat- 

 ural therefore that he, along with his Christian neighbor, 

 should be attacked in his moral fiber in the overcrowded tene- 

 ments in which he lived; that he should contract diseases 

 which were new and strange to him, and to which he had 

 formerly not been liable. In fact, his apparent immunity to 

 tuberculosis to-day, in spite of conditions, is a medical anomaly. 

 The wonder is that a greater percentage of the Jewish popu- 



