"Some of the tenements," added the report, "are owned by persons of the highest character, but they fail to appreciate the responsibility resting on them." This sentence makes it clear that landlords could own, and enormously profit from, pig-sty human habitations which killed off a large number of the unfortunate tenants, and yet these landlords could retain, in nowise diminished, the lustre of being men "of the highest character." Fully one-third of the deaths in New York and Brooklyn resulted from zymotic diseases contracted in these tenements, yet not even a whisper was heard, not the remotest suggestion that the men of wealth who thus deliberately profited from disease and death, were criminally culpable, although faint and timorous opinions were advanced that they might be morally responsible. HUMANITY OF NO CONSEQUENCE. Human life was nothing; the supremacy of the property idea dominated all thought and all laws, not because mankind was callous to suffering, wretchedness and legalized murder, but because thought and law represented what the propertied interests demanded. If the proletarian white population had been legal slaves, as the negroes in the South had been, much consideration would have been bestowed upon their gullets and domiciles, for then they would have been property; and who ever knew the owner of property to destroy the article which represented money? But being "free" men and women and children, the proletarians were simply so many bundles of flesh whose sickness and death meant pecuniary loss to no property-holder. Therefore casualities to them were a matter of no great concern to a society that was taught to venerate the sacredness of property as embodied in brick and stone walls, clothes, machines, and furniture, which same, if inert, had the all-important virile quality of having a cash value, which the worker had not. But these landlords "of the highest character" not only owned, and regularly collected rents from, tenement houses which filled the cemeteries, but they also resorted to the profitable business of leasing certain tenements to middlemen who guaranteed them by lease a definite and never-failing annual rental. Once having done this, the landlords did not care what the middlemen did--how much rent they exacted, or in what condition they allowed the tenements. "The middlemen," further reported the Metropolitan Board of Health,