“In the Ghetto, in one building, live seventy-one people, representing seventeen families. The toilets in the yard freeze in winter and are clogged in summer. The overcrowding here is fearful and the filth defies description. Within the same block are crowded a number of tenements three and four stories high with basement dwellings. One of these is used as a Jewish synagogue. Above and beneath and to the rear this building is crowded with tenement dwellers. The stairways are rickety, the rooms filthy, and all are overcrowded. The toilets for the whole population are in the cellar adjoining some of the dwelling rooms, reached by a short stairway. At the time of our visit the floors of this toilet, both inside and outside, were covered with human excrement and refuse to a depth of eight to twelve inches. Into this den of horrors all the population, male and female, had to go.” A typical dwelling of the Polish working people is thus described. “There is an entrance, perhaps under the steps, which leads to the apartments below. In this semibasement in the front lives a family. There are perhaps two rooms, sometimes only one. In the rear of this same basement lives another family. Above, on the first floor, lives another family, likewise in two or three small rooms; and in the rear is another. Thus four or more families live in one small cottage—and, often, in true tenement style, they ‘take in’ boarders.... Here, together, live men, women, children, dogs, pigeons, and goats in regular tenement and slum conditions.”[205] Such instances as these, which might be multiplied almost indefinitely, are individual manifestations of conditions which are represented _en masse_ by the figures of the Immigration Commission. It is apparent that slum conditions exist, fully developed, in other places than the great cities, and in other types of building than the regulation tenement. As will be seen later, they may be found in communities which do not come under the head of cities at all. The slum is a condition, not a place, and will crop up in the most unexpected places, whenever vigilance is relaxed. The slum can never be eradicated by erecting model dwellings, however well planned, nor by any other superficial method alone. The foundation of the slum rests in the social and economic relations of society, and can be effectually attacked only through them.