The dullest of us saw it. The tenement had given to New York the
name of "the homeless city." But with that gone which made life
worth living, what were liberty worth? With no home to cherish, how
long before love of country would be an empty sound? Life, liberty,
pursuit of happiness? Wind! says the slum, and the slum is right
if we let it be. We cannot get rid of the tenements that shelter
two million souls in New York to-day, but we set about making them
at least as nearly fit to harbor human souls as might be. That
will take a long time yet. But a beginning was made. With reform
looming upon the heels of the Lexow disclosures came the Gilder
Tenement-House Commission in the autumn of 1894.
[ Picture of an entitled "Typical East Side Tenement Block" subtitled
"Five hundred babies in it, not one bathtub"]
Greater work was never done for New York than by that faithful body
of men. The measure of it is not to be found in what was actually
accomplished, though the volume of that was great, but in what it
made possible. Upon the foundations they laid down we may build for
all time and be the better for it.
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