Word: man
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Dates: during 1900-1909
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Riding in a railroad car, the other day, with a Western man, a stranger, our talk strayed to the one absorbing topic: New York--its size, its wealth, its tunnels, its crowds...
There had been, half a century before, an earlier Tenement House Commission, appointed by the Senate of the State, to see what ailed New York. It came back to Albany and recommended, as a means of abolishing drunkenness, "furnishing to each man a clean and comfortable home. I suppose they laughed at that, called it paternal government, and, put in that bald shape, it looked like it. There were fifteen thousand tenements in New York at that early day. Today there are eighty thousand and their united influence goes toward the destruction of the home. The discovery, on this side...
...light into 40,000 tenement bedrooms that were dark and unventilated. Forty years we have wrestled with the powers of darkness and at last the law forbids the building of a tenement with a dark and airless room in it. The day is coming when it will forbid a man to own one. Meanwhile the sanitarians are trying to make it unprofitable to the owner...
These are the facts, as everyone knows who reads. New York City has, roughly speaking, half the voters in the Empire State. This is their home environment. Physically and morally, it "makes all for unrighteousness." Is it a square deal for the republic? One young man, just out of college, answered that question for himself, upon the evidence before him, along in the eighties, and straightway started an investigation of slavery in the tenement cigar-making industry. The action he brought about was labeled unconstitutional then--if I remember right--the fashion in labels has changed since under compulsion...
...modern experience, all human instinct, goes to support the belief that the cure for other things than drunkenness lies in giving every man a chance of a decent and comfortable home, that at all events without that chance he will not be content and cannot be counted upon as a good citizen. What choice shall we make then? How shall we rate our fellow-citizens of tomorrow--in terms of money, or of men? If the former, perhaps you will make money. If the latter, without fail you will make men. Which...