Ex-President Roosevelt is equally inaccurate in his criticism of the Jacobs case. He is reported as having said in one of his recent speeches that "the decision of the court in this case retarded by at least twenty years the work of tenement-house reform and was directly responsible for causing hundreds of thousands of American citizens now alive to be brought up under conditions of reeking filth and squalor, which measurably decreased their chance of turning out to be good citizens." The truth is that the decision did not retard tenement-house reform by a single day, and did not prevent the enactment of a single provision for securing sanitary conditions for those who work at home. In fact, the necessary legislation has since been readily secured and enacted in New York without any amendment of the state constitution. Our public health and labor laws now regulate the manufacture of tobacco and other articles in homes and require and secure sanitary conditions, and licenses authorizing manufacturing at home are issued subject to cancellation at any time if the surroundings become unsanitary. Mr. Sherman characterized as absurd the statement made by Mr. Roosevelt in regard to the effect of this decision, and added that "so far, then, from having done harm in the way of sanitary reform, the decision in the Jacobs case has done good by giving the reform a proper direction and object. Mr. Roosevelt's criticism receives a ready chorus of approval from a large body of ill-informed reformers who seek to prevent some of the evils of 'sweating' by arbitrarily forbidding all home manufacture in tenements. But the vast majority of tenement houses in New York are of a class better described as apartment houses, which are perfectly sanitary, and in such houses there is much home work of a good kind, such as fine sewing, art work, &c., and under good conditions; and it would be a deplorable and unnecessary interference with liberty to forbid such work as an incident to the prevention of home work in unsanitary slums."