182 PERILS.— THE CITY. 



the city, the greater are the riches of the rich and the 

 poverty of the poor. Not only does the proportion of the 

 poor increase with the growth of the city, but their con- 

 dition becomes more wretched. The poor of a city of 

 8,000 inhabitants are well off compared with many in 

 New York ; and there are hardly such depths of woe, such 

 utter and heart-wringing wretchedness in New York as 

 in London. Read in "The Bitter Cry of Outcast 

 London," a prophecy of what will some day be seen in 

 American cities, j)rovided existing tendencies continue : 

 ' ' Few who will read these pages have any conception of 

 what these pestilential human rookeries are, where tens 

 of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors which 

 call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage 

 of the slave-ship. To get into them you have to pene- 

 trate courts reeking with poisonous and malodorous 

 gases, arising from accumulations of sewage and refuse 

 scattered in all directions, and often flowing beneath 

 your feet ; courts, many of them which the sun never 

 penetrates, which are never visited by a breath of fresh 

 air. You have to ascend rotten staircases, grope your 

 way along dark and filthy passages swarming with 

 vermin. Then, if you are not driven back by the intol- 

 erable stench, you may gain admittance to the dens in 

 which these thousands of beings herd together. Eight 

 feet square! That is about the average size of very 

 many of these rooms. Walls and ceiling are black with 

 the accretions of filth which have gathered upon them 

 through long years of neglect. It is exuding through 

 cracks in the boards; it is everywhere. . . . Every 

 room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a 

 family, often two. In one cellar, a sanitary inspector 

 reports finding a father, mother, three children, and 

 four pigs. . . . Here are seven people living in one 

 underground kitchen, and a little dead child lying in 

 the same room. ElseAvhere is a poor widow, her three 

 children, and a child who had been dead thirteen days, i 



The investigations here reported were made in the 



summer. 



