184 PERILS. — THE CITY. 



sorts, congregate ; men who are ready on any pretext 

 to raise riots for the purpose of destruction and plunder ; 

 here gather foreigners and wage-workers who are espe- 

 cially susceptible to socialist arguments ; here skepticism 

 and ir religion abound; here inequality is the greatest 

 and most obvious, and the contrast between opulence 

 and penury the most striking; here is suffering the 

 sorest. As the greatest wickedness in the world is to be 

 found not among the cannibals of some far-off coast, but 

 in Christian lands where the light of truth is diffused 

 and rejected, so the utmost depth of wretchedness exists 

 not among savages who have few wants, but in great cities, 

 where, in the presence of plenty and of every luxury 

 men starve. Let a man become the owner of a home, and 

 he is much less susceptible to socialistic propagandism. 

 But real estate is so high in the city that it is almost im- 

 possible for a wage-worker to become a householder. In 

 1888 the Health. Department of New York made a census 

 which revealed the fact that there were then in the city 

 32,390 tenement houses,i occupied by 237,972 families, and 

 1,093,701 souls. Investigation in 1890 showed that the 

 tenement houses had increased in two years about 5,000. 

 If there were an average of 33.76 to each house, as in 

 1888, the tenement house population in 1890 was nearly 

 1,260,000. The law in New York requires a juror to be 

 owner of real or personal property valued at not less than 

 two hundred and fifty dollars; and this, the Commis- 

 sioner says, relieves seventy thousand of the registered 

 voters of New York City from jury duty. Let us re- 

 member that those seventy thousand voters represent a 

 population of two hundred and eighty thousand, or fifty- 

 six thousand families, not one of which has property to 

 the value of two hundred and fifty dollars. "During 

 the past three years, 220,976 persons in New York have 

 asked for outside aid in one form or another." ^ Said a 



^ In New York under the law of 1887, a tenement house is one occupied by 

 three or more famiUes, Hving separately. The above census did not include 

 the better class of apartment houses. 



2 Mrs. J. S. Lowell, in Tlie Christian Union, March 26, 1885. 



