Yet it is to be remembered that as one’s day is, so is his strength, even in the matter of smells, and while there are tenement evils there are also tenement house virtues. The close sociability engenders another species of Christianity. The policeman is near at hand to correct any evils. While the summers are dreadfully hot, the winters are also long and cold, and the two things most needed in a tenement house are coal and sunlight. The tenement house laws have been made at Albany by the landlords of these houses, many of whom are rapacious and merciless. Not a single day is given by law, I understand, to a tenant who does not pay the rent. The landlord is permitted to put his agent or constable in any apartment and set the things on the sidewalk, whatever may be the disaster or the disease within. Many of these tenement houses have been built up by the sales of liquor and beer, and probably the majority of our Irish saloon-keepers project a corner in which they do business into a tenement house above, and they both provide the rum and collect the rent. Possibly the men above stairs drink away their wages in the saloon below, while the women work at something to keep the rent up. In some cases, especially among the more rural Irish, the shanty in the suburbs is substituted for tenement house life. As you walk along some of the newly filled streets, composed of great rocks which have been blasted in one spot to fill up another spot, you will look down into a former meadow, now a mere hole surrounded by four dungeon walls of stone, and there you will see three or four shanties pitched together on suffrance, made of old boards taken out of some fence or from dry goods boxes. Unaware of anybody being about, you can sit there and hear the whole domestic menage going on; see Patrick, very drunk, sociably quarreling with his wife, who is not far behind him in her potations. They perhaps keep a cow somewhere down there under the planks, and this cow is being milked more or less all the time, and if the milk can not be sold it helps to support the life of the squatters. Again, you will go into some far quarter of this island, many miles from the business centers, and to your surprise you will there find another species of tenement house, showing that this system of herding together and economizing room is the fate of this city at least. There seems to be no future for the tenement house system. The laws passed by our state legislature with reference to this city are more apt to be in favor of the tenement house proprietor than of the tenant. The tenants hardly know where the legislature is, while the tenement house owner is informed by his lawyer or lobbyist of what is going on. As far as philanthropy goes, it despairs of accomplishing anything in the midst of such a dense population. Of course, when things become outrageous, the police report them to the Board of Health, or the tenants take the law into their own hands.