[Sidenote: A Visit to the Cave-Dwellers] An Inspector thus describes a visit to one of these subterranean abodes: “We enter a room whose low ceiling is blackened with smoke, and its walls discolored with damp. In front, opening on a narrow area covered with green mould, two small windows, their tops scarcely level with the court-yard, afford at noonday a twilight illumination to the apartment. Through their broken panes they admit the damp air laden with effluvia, which constitutes the vital atmosphere inhaled by all who are immured in this dismal abode. A door at the back of this room communicates with another which is entirely dark, and has but this one opening. Both rooms together have an area of about eighteen feet square. “The father of the family, a day laborer, is absent. The mother, a wrinkled crone at thirty, sits rocking in her arms an infant whose pasty and pallid features tell that decay and death are usurping the place of health and life. Two older children are in the street, which is their only playground, and the only place where they can go to breathe an atmosphere that is even comparatively pure. A fourth child, emaciated to a skeleton, and with that ghastly and unearthly look which marasmus impresses on its victims, has reared his feeble frame on a rickety chair against the window sill, and is striving to get a glimpse of the smiling heavens, whose light is so seldom permitted to gladden its longing eyes. Its youth has battled nobly against the terrible morbid and devitalizing agents which have oppressed its childish life--the poisonous air, the darkness, and the damp; but the battle is nearly over--it is easy to decide where the victory will be.” But I need not multiply the evidences that 18,000 people, men, women, and children (a goodly-sized town), are to-day living in our city in a condition the most destructive to health, happiness, and morals that could possibly be devised. As you look into these abodes of wretchedness, filth and disease, the inmates manifest the same lethargic habits as animals, burrowing in the ground. They are, indeed, half narcotized by the constant inhalation of the emanations of their own bodies, and by a prolonged absence of light and fresh air. Here we never find sound health, while the constant sickness rate ranges from 75 to 90 per cent. [Sidenote: Tenant-House Population] Now, as to the second condition under which we find the laboring classes. It is estimated by the police that the tenant-house population of New York reaches the enormous figure of 500,000 or about half of the total number of inhabitants. The great and striking fact in regard to the domiciliary condition of the tenant-house class is overcrowding and deficient sunlight and fresh air. The landlord of the poor tenant-house has two principal motives--first, to pack as many people as he can in a given space, and second, to make as few improvements and repairs as possible.