How can you have a heaven without a hell? For if there be no hell then all must go to heaven. But you can no more have a heaven without a hell than you can have a pure and clean city, free from nuisance and pestilence, without scavengers, sewers and sinks. A pure city implies impure commons, where all that is unfit to be in the city is cast out. The wicked surely cannot be with the saints; they must be together by themselves where the unholy passions that reign in them would soon make a hell. If there be no future punishment, if all go to heaven when they die, then a rope will do more for a man and transfer him quicker to heaven than a life-long service for Christ. Vice is connived at and virtue discouraged if there be no future retribution. If there is no retribution, then we must expect to have for our immortal associates drunkards, blasphemers and all the base villains that ever disgraced humanity. No hell is contradictory to conscience and reason. The future punishment of the impenitent wicked is what our common sense demands. XXIII. THE TENEMENT HOUSE PROBLEM. MUCH has been said and written of the New York tenement houses, their gloom, filth and squalor, of the cruel landlordism, and I know from personal investigations that the wretchedness in which thousands of our unfortunate brothers and sisters live has not been overdrawn. The most skilled artist would find his pencil lie broken before him if he attempted to delineate upon canvas the wretchedness of the slums. The most acute conception of the reporter's fancy, the most graphic description of the orator, the boldest flights of the poet's imagination, would be inadequate in executing a descriptive scene of the woes of our poor and our abominable landlordism. These tenements are not only the nurseries of seventy-five per cent. of our crime, but they are also the abodes of many worthy poor who are struggling against their surroundings to improve their condition, and give their children a better chance in the race of life than they themselves had. The death-rate in Hester Street is forty per cent. higher than the average made by the plague in Brazil, and throughout the tenement district the deaths usually outnumber the births, so that if it were not for the continued stream of immigration the tenement house problem would soon solve itself. The vast majority of our down-town and east-side tenements are not fit to be inhabited; the landlords do not pretend to obey the laws of health, yet the tenants are paying large enough rents to yield landlords and estates from ten to twenty per cent. A recent writer in The Forum says: "One man boasted that he draws thirty-three per cent. on his tenement investments." Rear lofts and sub-cellars rent from $1.50 to $4.00 a week. Talk of evictions in Ireland, they are nothing compared to the evictions and cruel landlordism of our slums! The landlord is often an enormously wealthy estate which hires an agent, whose only business is to show a large balance of profits, and the poorer the tenements the larger the profits. O landlord or estate too busy to collect your own rents, it is your duty to glorify God in your property as well as in your body and soul; it is for you to know how your agent can bring you from fifteen to twenty per cent. profit on your tenement investments. The enormous sums that our wretched poor pay for the most wretched accommodations seem so incredible that I hesitate to present figures. Our large moneyed institutions which find it difficult to secure safe investments at four per cent. should take hold of this tenement question. Philanthropists with big bank accounts should look in this direction as a field in which to uplift their fellow-men. There is a greater demand for this class of benevolent investments in New York than there is for added cathedrals, churches, colleges or charity organizations. The greatest benefaction that could befall this city would be the replacing of our tenements by such buildings as the Victoria Square in Liverpool. On this square once stood miserable tenement houses. Today a magnificent structure stands there, built around a hollow square, a large portion of which is given up to a playground for the children. All arrangements in the house are according to the demands of modern science. No room is smaller than thirteen by eighteen feet and six inches; the ceilings are nine feet high. Three-room tenements rent for $1.44 a week, while one-room quarters are let at 54 cents a week. The total expenditure on the |