We drained it into the tenements, and for the police infamy got a
real-estate blackmail that is worse. The chairman of the Committee
of Fifteen tells us that of more than a hundred tenements, full of
growing children, which his committee has canvassed, not one had
escaped the contamination that piles up the landlord's profits.
Twelve dollars for an honest flat, thirty for the other kind and
no questions asked! I find in my scrap-book this warning, sounded
by me in the Christmas holidays, 1893, when the country was ringing
with Dr. Parkhurst's name:--
"I would not, whatever else might happen, by any hasty or ill-advised
system of wholesale raids crowd these women into the tenements and
flats of our city. That is what will surely happen, is happening
now. It is a danger infinitely greater than any flowing from their
presence where they are, and as they are. Each centre of moral
contagion by this scattering process becomes ten or twenty, planted
where they will do the most possible harm. Think of the children
brought in daily, hourly contact with this vice! Think of the
thousands of young women looking vainly for work this hard winter!
Be there ever so little money for woman's honest work, there is
always enough to buy her virtue.
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