The existence of the tenement-house evils, it must be borne in mind, is chargeable primarily to the owner and landlord, not to the foreign occupant. The landlords are especially to blame for the ill consequences. The immigrant cannot dictate terms or conditions. He has to go where he can. The prices charged for rent are exorbitant, and should secure decency and healthful quarters. No property is so remunerative. This rent money is literally blood money in thousands of instances, and yet every effort to improve things is bitterly fought. Why should not socialism and anarchism grow in such environment? Of course many of the immigrants are familiar with poor surroundings and do not apparently object to dirt and crowding. But that does not make these conditions less perilous to American life. Self-respect has a hard struggle for survival in these sections, and if the immigrant does not possess or loses that, he is of the undesirable class. Mr. Robert Hunter makes the statement that no other city in the world has so many dark and windowless rooms, or so many persons crowded on the acre, or so many families deprived of light and air as New York. He says there are 360,000 dark rooms in Greater New York. And these are almost entirely occupied by the foreigners. But unsanitary conditions prevail also in all the cities, large and small, and especially in the mine and mill and factory towns, wherever large masses of the poorest workers live. [Sidenote: Legal Remedies Possible] Concerning possible legislation to correct these city evils of environment, Mr. Sargent says: "So far as the overcrowding in city tenements is concerned, municipal ordinances in our large cities prescribing the amount of space which rapacious landlords should, under penalties sufficiently heavy to enforce obedience, be required to give each tenant, would go far toward attaining the object in view. Whether such a plan could be brought into existence through the efforts of our general government, or whether the Congress could itself legislate directly, upon sanitary and moral grounds, against the notorious practice of housing aliens with less regard for health and comfort than is shown in placing brute animals in pens, the Bureau is unprepared to say. [Sidenote: Demands Immediate Remedy] It is, however, convinced that no feature of the immigration question so insistently demands public attention and effective action. The evil to be removed is one that is steadily and rapidly on the increase, and its removal will strike at the root of fraudulent elections, poverty, disease, and crime in our large cities, and on the other hand largely supply that increasing demand for labor to develop the natural resources of our country."[71] [Sidenote: Little Italy]