Tell me, what think you of “homes” where men and women “crowded beneath moldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars”? I quote that from a report of the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, one of the most conservative and one of the wisest of our public charities, which, with unerring instinct, saw that the way to improve the condition, the morals, of the people was to give them decent homes. What do you think of cellar “homes” in which the children had to stay in bed till the tide fell; of homes where children died, “smothered by the foul air of an un-ventilated room,” a windowless room[2] which the light of day never entered! That was the burden of a death certificate registered in the Health Department in those old, indifferent days. What think you of a city one-quarter of whose children never grew up to lisp the sacred name of mother, one-third of whose babies never reached their third year, and one-half never manhood or womanhood! That was the record; and, when decency came, the death rate came down with it. Child murder ceased to be the fashion. In thirty-five years, the mortality in my city, while the population grew and grew, was reduced one-half. I mean, of course, the percentage of deaths upon the population. In the last dozen years, reform has saved enough lives in New York City alone annually to people a city of no mean proportions. Footnote 2: Since these lectures were delivered the struggle to preserve the tenement-house law has developed the fact that after thirty-seven years there are still over 300,000 windowless, dark rooms in the tenements of the Greater New York! I must refer those who wish to get at the statistical facts to the reports of the successive Tenement House Commissions, or to my own record of the “Battle with the Slum,” in which I have tried to gather them all. Only let me mention here that the death rate of New York came down from 26.32 per 1,000 inhabitants, in 1887, to 19.53 in 1897. It had been known to run as high as 45 in 1,000 in bad seasons of the bad past; and in individual instances much higher than that.