White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy Poor by Banks, Louis Albert

There are scores, and I think I should be safe to say hundreds, of tenement houses within the city limits of Boston which are unfit to be inhabited, and where the landlords do not pretend to obey the laws of health required by the statutes, and yet the tenants are paying a sufficiently large rent to pay good interest on a clean, healthful tenement. Our modern science and our Christian civilization are alike challenged by this condition of things.

Yet, as you think of the horror of these Boston "cabins" and their miserable tenants, you will say, "They are at least free, they cannot be bought and sold like Uncle Tom." Alas! they are not free. True, no one can take them to an auction-block, but their bondage is none the less real. Into that fearfully neglected Italian tenement house which I have tried to describe in this discourse, the sweater had come, and women were making a fine class of knee pants for twenty cents a dozen pairs, which means forty cents a day in wages. These people find it impossible to save. The lower strata of wages in Boston, and in all our large cities, has reached the point where the people who depend on them labor simply to exist. One day's sickness in father or mother or child leaves a gap it takes weeks or months to bridge over again.

[Illustration: TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING.]

Sometimes a Southern Uncle Tom or Aunt Chloe had their son or daughter sold out of their arms, leaving them with broken hearts. But the white slaves of the tenement house sound every deep of human agony. Think what it is to try to raise boys honest, when their playmates are thieves from the cradle! Think of the agony of a mother fighting the wolf of starvation day and night and finding, as, one Boston mother did only a few weeks ago, that the wolf of lust had devoured her one ewe lamb before she was yet thirteen years of age! Brothers, it is not yet time for the "abolitionist" to put aside his tocsin or his sword while so many of our brothers and sisters are living and sighing in their despair:--

VIII.

SOCIAL MICROBES IN BOSTON TENEMENT HOUSES, AND HOW TO DESTROY THEM.

--ALFRED TENNYSON: _In Memoriam._

The greatest claim Job ever makes for himself is that in the days of his prosperity, when everybody knew him and was obsequious to him as a rich man, he was not only kind to the poor, but exhibited for them a genuine sympathy which was illustrated in his carefully searching out the causes of their troubles.