Nature rarely fails to avenge the violation of her laws, but it might be doubted if the perversion of any other natural instinct has entailed more numerous or direr penalties than our habitual outrages against the instinct of home-life. The monstrosities of our tenement system, by a moderate estimate, cost on the average every year the lives of 1,500,000 children under ten years of age (in Europe and North America), and of 1,200,000 consumptives, besides thousands of victims to epidemic disorders, aggravated, if not engendered, by the influence of vitiated air. Habitual intemperance, too, has undoubtedly been increased by the dearth of home-comforts. Our factory-laborers, our mechanics, and thousands of students and young clerks, spend their evenings in riot, because the man-trap of the lowest grog-shop is, after all, less unattractive than the dungeon of a stifling tenement home. In many of our larger cities similar causes have led to a constant increase of a manner of existence which a modern reformer calls the “celibacy of vice.” But the decreasing demand for independent homes is not the only cause of the decreased supply, and the heartless selfishness of our wealthy land-gluttons has provoked a form of nihilism which threatens to shake, if not to subvert, the very foundations of social life. E.—REFORM. That latter danger seems, at last, to have awakened our political economists to the necessity of redressing a many-sided abuse, and the failure of earlier reform projects has at least helped to emphasize the demand for more adequate remedies. The traffic in human life in the floating hells of the African slave-traders hardly called for more stringent repressive measures than the inhumanity of our tenement speculators who fatten on the profits of a system propagating the infallible seeds of pulmonary consumption, and sacrificing the lives of more children than the superstition of the dark ages ever doomed to the altars of Moloch. Even in a country where the jealousy of personal rights would hardly countenance legislative interference with the construction of private dwelling-houses, the license of tenement-owners ought to be circumscribed by the conditions of Dr. Paul Boettger’s rule, providing for appropriation of a certain number of cubic feet of breathing space, and square feet of window, front, and garden (or play-ground) room for each tenant or family of tenants. The abuse of sub-renting could be limited by similar provisions, and the adoption of the separate cottage plan should be promoted by the reduction of municipal passenger tariffs and suburban taxes.