White Slaves

hould in his

as the worl

SON: Fragments of

one thing, perhaps, did more to reveal the terrible cruelty of the system, and to arouse

her seventieth birthday, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes read a poem in which Mrs. Stowe's

himedes s

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our planet

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Progress:" "My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it." M

its and vegetables flourished under careful training." This little log house was a small and crowded dwelling-place for Uncle Tom and his wife and little ones, yet it had several things in its favor. In the first place it had plenty of sunshine and pure air. It was an individual cabin, occupied b

x floors under one roof. In a great many of these sunlight is an impossibility. Boston is peculiarly cursed with the rear tenement. All through the North End and some parts of the West End and "the Cove," there abound dark courts, oft

: COURT OFF N

t sunshiny day there is only a little light during the middle of the day, and never any direct rays of the sun. I found, up in one of these rooms, a young woman with her first-born in her arms,-a pale, sickly little child, not yet a year old, that will certainly die before the summer is out, if it stays there. This poor young mother was born in Maine, and followed her husband

RWAY LEADING TO UNDE

, or now and then sends a slant ray, thrown down into the dark court in seeming mockery. It is impossible for any one to get from language alone, either spoken or written, an adequate idea of the loneliness, the sense of gloom, the filth and squalor, of the apartments in some of these Boston tenement houses. It requires a strong stomach, and a still stronger determination that nothing shall thwart you from knowing how your brothers and sisters live, to take you the second time into such a place. Go with me into one that is not ten minutes' walk from the mansions of wealth and luxury on Beacon Hill. We go back through a narrow passage, where you can touch the walls on either side of you, and then down some steps into a dark underground court. Now you have to bend over almost double

ICK MAN IN UNDER

ne dollar per week. They have to cook, eat, sleep, and do everything else pertaining to domestic life, in this one dark, filthy hole. The combination of smells is indescribable. But as you begin to sicken and are ready to flee, you remember, with a shock, that what sickens you so in five minutes this old white-headed man and his wife have to endure day after day, and night after night, and on-and on-there is no hope of anything better this side of a pauper's grave. Don't blame these old people for not keeping their den clea

its wretchedness, live hundreds of your brothers and sisters. Not the drunken and the dissolute only, for about this place which I have described, or its tenants, there was not the slightest suggestion of liquor anywhere. Down on North Street is an old house which, the traditions tell us, was originally built for a "wayside inn," in the good old days before the word hotel was so well known as now. It is not a very large house, as tenement houses go,

ve buried a good flock. Too much trouble broke my very life out of me." We go in at another door. Here is an English woman; she has two children and keeps a boarder. She scrubs now in a bank building, and washes at other places. She sewed for a long time. At first she was paid fourteen cents a pair for finishing pants, then thirteen cents, t

n: AN ANCIEN

, it cannot be less than a hundred and thirty. But the fire cannot go out, or the washing will stop, and there will be no food to-morrow. For these two miserable sweat-boxes-the paper half torn off, bed-bug dens that nothing could thoroughly cleanse except a fire that would exterminate the very walls-she pays two dollars and a half per week. As a striking illustration of the good

ring the past week in company with two other gentlemen. The houses o

eet long. At its narrow end it is only five feet six inches wide, and at the other end not quite seven feet wide. In this narrow lane five people live. Huge strings of bananas in every stage of ripening hang over the piles of filthy bedding. It is in

n in it, set on the floor. The bread, kneaded and ready to bake, is laid out on an old, dirty, colored handkerchief on the pile of bedding; there are no chairs, table, or other furniture of any kind. Another room which also a

ITALIAN FRUIT-V

floor after floor. Now, section fourteen of the law in regard to tenement houses says: "The tenant of any lodging-house or tenement house shall thoroughly cleanse all the rooms, floors, windows, and doors of the house, or part of the house, of which he is the tenant, to the satisfaction of the Board of Health; and the owne

t to know-when I say that there is a shameful and dangerous lack of such attention in many of these tenement houses. In regard to the houses I have just described the law is a dead letter. The passages and stairs are filthy beyond description. Some of these corridors are only twen

COCKROACHES B

ion: BANAN

is sold daily in every section of the city, and people who live with healthful surroundings, far away from this pestilent hole, are risking the health of themselves and their children, unwittingly, by purchasing fruit that cannot help but have absorbed something of the poison from the atmosphere of these filthy, crowded quarters. The Board of Health know about this place, for their sign is put up over the doors of these rooms, telling how many are allowed to sleep in each room; but they might as well have kept the si

and their families, and the poorer classes of the Irish population. The first one visited was the house known as the Slate block on First Street. Here was seen one of the best examples of the worst class of dwellings, and one in which legislation had accomplished but little. Here was a building where the law had not been complied with regarding whitewashing, and the walls were dirty and stained with smoke. Hardly a house

DER-GROUND TENEME

r people who live by days' wages, and are struggling against their surroundings to improve their condition, and especially to give their children a fairer chance in the race for life than they themselves have had. These last are the people whom it is worth while to help for their own sake. You will observe," says this cool-headed doctor, "that I am considering this matter entirely from the money point of view, without reference to religion or morals or altruism. The question, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is far more important, I admit; but I confine myself to a lower plane-to the bread-and-butter aspects of municipal life. Great numbers of the incompetent, vicious, idle, deformed, or starved-brain class have been poured into this country by immigration during the last fifty years, and have filled our slums and tenement houses, our hospitals, asylums, alms-houses, and jails to overflowing. They cannot escape the results of their physical organization, which, in its turn, is an inherited result of ancestral degeneration. For them we may 'hope the best, but hold the present, fatal daughter of the past.' Their death rates are from two to three times as great as those of the better class of populat

nd where the landlords do not pretend to obey the laws of health required by the statutes, and yet the tenants are paying a sufficiently large rent to

less real. Into that fearfully neglected Italian tenement house which I have tried to describe in this discourse, the sweater had come, and women were making a fine class of knee pants for twenty cents a dozen pairs, which means forty cents a day in wages. These people find i

TWO O'CLOCK I

se boys honest, when their playmates are thieves from the cradle! Think of the agony of a mother fighting the wolf of starvation day and night and finding, as, one Boston mother did only a few weeks ago, that the wolf of lust had devo

a hovel, and

that the wo

e cherish lest

h is crime, ou