In the house next door, embroidering rich cloaks, Hamilton found a family of which several of the members had a bad infectious skin disease.  Chancing to meet a health inspector soon afterwards he told him about this family and gave him their address.

“I can stop it, as far as this family is concerned,” the health officer said, “and I suppose I ought to.  But you know what it means, I suppose?”

“What?” asked the boy.

“It means, if I take their work away, they will starve to death in a couple of weeks.”

“And if you don’t?”

“If I don’t, they’ll go on spreading disease.  Oh, I’ll have to put a stop to it, of course, but tell me what is going to happen to the family.”

“They ought to go to a hospital,” Hamilton said.

The health officer shook his head.

“They are not hospital cases,” he said.  “None of them need more medical attention than they can get in a dispensary, and every hospital to which they applied would treat them in an Out-Patient department.  They would have to take in more work, or die.”

“But where would they get the work?”

“Any of these sweatshop jobbers will give it to them.  It makes no difference to the middlemen where the work is done or out of what dens it comes, as long as it is done cheap.”

“And is all clothing open to the same risk?” asked the boy.

The health inspector shook his head.

“Cheap clothing is not,” he said, “because even the cheapest kind of labor is more expensive than machinery, and machine-made clothes are clean.  But costly dresses which need hand embroidery are sent to sweatshops to be done.  Not all, of course, but enough of them to keep thousands of women and children working day and night the year round.  The more elaborate the gown, the longer is it likely to have been in a tenement that the future wearer would not even allow her dog to enter.”

From house to house Hamilton went, finding misery at every step, with the single consolation that the schedule showed in almost every case that the son or the daughter who was working had moved out of the slums, or that the family had progressed sufficiently to find better quarters.  Everywhere the children from these fearful homes seemed to have been dowered with promise, and as Burns had suggested, the sole comfort and hope for the future lay in the fact that the New York slum is a one-generation slum.

It was growing toward noon when Hamilton finished the short list that the Inspector had given him in that poorest section, and he was glad when he was able to leave the pressure of the poverty behind him.  His next district was a section of the Italian quarter, and Hamilton knew that while he would find poverty of a certain kind there, there was enough of the community spirit among the Italians to prevent such conditions as he had witnessed and enough frugality among them to enable them to make the best of all they had.