The “tenement-house,” which is now one of the “institutions” of New York, stands usually upon a lot 25 by 100 feet, is from four to six stories high, and is so divided internally as to contain four families on each floor,—­each family eating, drinking, sleeping, cooking, washing, and fighting in a room eight feet by ten and a bed-room six feet by ten; unless, indeed,—­which very frequently happens, says Mr. Halliday,—­the family renting these two rooms takes in another family to board, or sub-lets one room to one or even two other families!

But the modern improvements?

One of the largest and most recently built of the New York “barracks” has apartments for 126 famines.  It was built especially for this use.  It stands on a lot 50 by 250 feet, is entered at the sides from alleys eight feet wide, and, by reason of the vicinity of another barrack of equal height, the rooms are so darkened that on a cloudy day it is impossible to read or sew in them without artificial light.  It has not one room which can in any way be thoroughly ventilated.  The vaults and sewers which are to carry off the filth of the 126 families have grated openings in the alleys, and door-ways in the cellars, through which the noisome and deadly miasmata penetrate and poison the dank air of the house and the courts.  The water-closets for the whole vast establishment are a range of stalls without doors, and accessible not only from the building, but even from the street.  Comfort is here out of the question; common decency has been rendered impossible; and the horrible brutalities of the passenger-ship are day after day repeated,—­but on a larger scale.  And yet this is a fair specimen.  And for such hideous and necessarily demoralizing habitations,—­for two rooms, stench, indecency, and gloom, the poor family pays—­and the rich builder receives—­"thirty-five per cent, annually on the cost of the apartments!"

When a city has half a million of inhabitants who must content themselves with such quarters as these, which, even the beasts of the field would perish in, does any man wonder that 18,000 women were arrested in the last year? that in the three months ending January 31st, 1859, 13,765 arrests were made by the city police, of which over one-third were females, one in six under twenty years of age, and more than one-half under thirty? that in 1855 there was one death in every 26-1/3 of the population? that in 1858 the five city dispensaries were called on to treat (gratuitously) 65,442 infant patients? that, in 1855, 1,938 infants were stillborn, and 6,390, or 1 in 99 of the population, did not live the first year out? while, at the present time, 20,000 children roam the streets, and never enter a schoolroom?  With such homes, is there cause for surprise that husbands murder their wives? that mothers abuse their children,—­and would kill them, too, were they not profitable little slaves, as Mr. Halliday shows? that men and women live in drunken stupor upon the spoils of young children,—­often not their own,—­sent out to beg, to steal, or do worse yet? that even the very fag-end of humanity, the sentiment of “honor among thieves,” perishes here?