National dietaries and their results on character and life, fascinating as the investigation is, have no place in the present paper, the design of which is simply to show the existing state of the food-question among the poor.  Of these, poor Irish form far the larger proportion, a German or French pauper being almost an anomaly.  Thrift seems the birthright of both the French and German peasant, as well as of the middle class, and their careful habits, joined to the better rate of wages in America, soon make them prosperous and well-to-do citizens.  It is in the tenement-houses that we must seek for the mass of the poor, and it is in the tenement-houses that we find the causes which, combined, are making of the generation now coming up a terror in the present and a promise of future evil beyond man’s power to reckon.  They are a class apart, retaining all the most brutal characteristics of the Irish peasant at home, but without the redeeming light-heartedness, the tender impulses and strong affections of that most perplexing people.  Sullen, malicious, conscienceless, with no capacity for enjoyment save in drink and the lowest forms of debauchery, they are filling our prisons and reformatories, marching in an ever-increasing army through the quiet country, and making a reign of terror wherever their footsteps are heard.  With a little added intelligence they become Socialists, doing their heartiest to ruin the institutions by which they live.  The Socialistic leader knows well with what he deals, and can sound every chord of jealousy and suspicion and revenge lying open to his touch.  On the rich lies the whole responsibility of want and disease and crime.  Equalize property, and these three dark shadows flee fast before the sunshine of prosperity.  Character, intelligence, common decencies and common virtues have nothing to do with present conditions, and the ardent leveller of class-distinctions counts as his enemy any one who seeks to give the poor a truer knowledge of how far their earnings may be made to go toward securing better food or less pestilent homes.

Yet foul air and overcrowding would be less fatal in their results were food understood.  The well-filled stomach gives strange powers of resistance to the body, and nothing shows this more strongly than the myriad cases of children and infants who are taken from the tenement-houses to the sanitariums at Bath or Rockaway.  A week or two of pure air and plenty of milk gives a look almost of health to children who have been brought there often with glazed eyes and pinched, ghastly little faces.  Air has meant half, but many mothers have been persuaded to give milk or oatmeal porridge instead of weak tea and bread poisoned with alum, and have found the child’s strength become a permanent and not temporary fact.