Note Return to text — REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES AND NEGLECTED CRIMES.

It is not unreasonable to say that every thousand dollars wantonly wasted, represents the destruction of the one human life that it would have saved, and while this slaughter of the innocents proceeds, society is cursed with the presence of over 100,000 criminals, paupers, tramps, and vagrants in the State of New York, who might have been reared into respectable citizenship with a small fragment of the wealth that is squandered in the hurtful ostentation that panders to a vicious taste. While poor women in New York are fighting hunger at arm’s length, or looking through ash barrels and offal buckets, their wealthy sisters think nothing of spending ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on their toilet, or wearing a $130,000 necklace, or half a million in diamonds in a Washington court circle,—all of which I hope to see in time condemned by a purer taste as tawdry and offensive vulgarity, even if it were not done in the presence of misery as it is. “Twenty-four hours in the slums” (says Julia H. Percy, in the New York World)—“just a night and a day—yet into them were crowded such revelations of misery, and depravity, and degradation as having once been gazed upon, life can never be the same afterwards.” Such is life in New York. What it is in “Darkest England,” as portrayed by General Booth, is too wretched and loathsome to be reproduced here. But we must not fail to understand that five sixths of the people of the millionaire’s metropolis, New York, live in the tenement-house region, a breeding centre of intemperance, pestilence, crime, and future mobs, where wretched life is crushed to deeper wretchedness by the avaricious exaction of unfeeling landlords10 worse than those against whom the Irish rebel. Is not the splendor of such a city like the hectic flush on the consumptive’s cheek? The statistics of the past year reveal the startling fact that New York is a decaying city; that its population has no natural growth, but had 853 more deaths than births.