The labor, factory, building, tenement house, compulsory school, sanitary and kindred laws on the statute books of New York are the enunciation and result of the humanity that is within us. We have more to do now in regard to humanity to relieve the taxation of the necessaries of life-the door is open for it.

We often read about the odious tax on windows and doors that has prevailed in European countries for centuries, and still prevails in some of them. Do we ever reflect that the practical effect of compelling by law the number and place of windows and doors and ventilation in tenement houses and other costly requirements in and about buildings, and then taxing the value of the cost of them in connection with the land on which they stand, is virtually of the same nature, and tax on the light and air and waterthe prime necessaries of all life? The only difference is in name; the old mode is a direct tax, while that still prevailing among us is an indirect tax, which the user must pay for indirectly by the assessment of their cost upon the property. Do we ever feel that it can be and should be made less by reducing the tax on real estate in some manner?

The construction of tenement houses in New York City within thirty-five years past, under such laws and regulations as existed in regard to buildings, and permitted lack of proper sanitary accommodations of water, light and ventilation, to supply which would cause more expense to the builder and owner without being appreciated by the class of tenants they were intended to get, or because of low rent, became so notorious that, on the recommendation of a commission of citizens appointed by Gov. Roosevelt to investigate and report on the matter, a law was passed in April, 1901, prescribing particularly how far sanitary measures must be complied with for living rooms, in having ventilation, light, water, closets, bath tubs, wash tubs, etc., according to the number of families that were to occupy them. The report of the commission gives some details of the existing conditions, which, it appears, are demanded by the law for the wants and needs of a class of tenants from whom the owner of such buildings often gets twenty per cent. annually on the investment for the cheap structures, that are virtually contaminated with disease caused by uncleanliness and overcrowding, while the moral effect is worse than death to the individuals and to the community at large, and a disgrace to any nation.

The positive requirements of this law of 1901 is evidence enough of the existence and prevalence of such evils among us.

These conditions in cities have largely grown out of a diversion of capital from real estate investments in better houses for lowrent dwellings in New York City, to seek more profitable investmements in some kinds of securities that are not taxable, and to seek investments in other States, in other channels, and in such enterprises as promise to pay best. In doing this, capital is following a natural law of the least resistance to its safety and profit, which is a potent law in the business world, like that in the physical world, that a body will follow the lines of the least resistance. The result is that high rents in New York City are a necessary evil that we must try to overcome with a proper regard for the health and happiness of all, by such a system as is in line with the growth and development of the demands of modern civilization.

Whether the demand for lower rents is caused by the greed of landlords, or the greed of tenants, or the greed of employers, or the greed of toilers, we know that in all its varied aspects it is part of human nature and must be met and dealt with by legislation accordingly. We know that the families of the toilers need more of the prime necessaries of life than they are likely to have when rents are high.

The requirements of the tenement house law of 1901 are eminently proper when applied to the erection of buildings for any purpose. Although it is at a much greater cost to the builder, and hence to the tenant for rent, the ultimate welfare of those that must, or choose to, use it and humanity demand that its requirements should be obeyed.

A proper regard for those that desire or are compelled to hold or use dwellings and buildings, and the general welfare of New York, and a consideration of the more favorable conditions of taxation offered in adjoining States, demand that such kinds and modes of assessment for local improvements and taxation, and the extent to which it now prevails, must be made less, and be more favorable to real estate.

One remedy to have lower rents is to have taxation taken off real estate, as far as can be without parsimony to municipal economy and progress. This can be done by transferring some portion of this tax on real estate to other property and other conditions. The extent and mode of this transfer must depend upon conditions that should be carefully considered from a utilitarian point of view, and applied accordingly in a humane and just manner.

(To be continued.)

COSMOPOLITAN HEALTH STUDIES.*

By F. L. OSWALD, M. D.,

Author of "Physical Education," "The Remedies of Nature," Etc.

III.-SPAIN.

Race, climate and fate, according to Hippolyte Taine, are the three factors of nation-building, and the auguries of the two first combined to favor Spain above any other country of the eastern continent.

Her mixture of races, as completed about a thousand years ago, comprised the noblest tribes of three world-conquering nations, together with a remnant of heroic aborigines-the Celt-Iberians, who resisted the power of Rome for more than three hundred years. Spain was long the most prosperous province of the Roman Empire, something more than a province in social respects, since it produced such men as the Emperor Trajan and the philosopher Seneca.

The fifth century added the Visigoths, and the seventh the Saracens, both champions of their races and enabled by luck to achieve their conquests without land-destroying wars.

And that land was the Eden of southern Europe. The Goths selected it for a permanent home, after a series of victories that gave them the pick of the Mediterranean peninsulas, and its fertility astonished the followers of Tarik, who had seen the gardenspots of Egypt and Asia Minor.

Blood did tell for a while. For several hundred years Spain alone saved Europe from the reproach of social retrogression; the civilization of the Gothic-Moorish cities was intellectually not much. inferior to that of pagan Rome, physically about equal, and morally far superior. The era of the Saracens achieved the first national conquests of Temperance—the anti-alcohol precepts of Pythagoras having been adopted only by a feeble and somewhat compromising sect of mystics.

The chronicle of the Cid seems to have been largely interwoven with fiction, but the Barcelona collection of defensive armor attests the fact that the land of his birth was inhabited by a giant race,

*Continued from page 35.

men as tall as the cavaliers of Cœur de Lion, and as indefatigable as the followers of Hannibal, to judge by the record of their forced marches.

"No wonder the Turks could beat those fellows," said an irreverent Yankee tourist in a museum stocked with relics of the Crusades. "Imagine a man trying to hustle with a parlor-stove for an cvercoat."

But the Knights of Calatrava could hustle, in spite of such impediments. Their five days' gallop from Burgos to Navarre admits of no doubt; nor their achievements on the battlefield of Navas de Tolosa, where they annihilated a levy of Moslem champions who had been gathered from the most warlike cities of the Spanish and North African coast lands.

How shall we account for that zenith to nadir degradationthe change from ancient Goths to modern Spaniards?

Climatic changes? The invention of gunpowder? In North Africa, too, rifles have become better and the weather grievances worse; yet the Bedouins are still as sinewy and enterprising as their ancestors in the days of Tarik.

But it is true that "villainous saltpeter" witched Spain's chivalry away in the course of a border warfare so persistent that it dwarfed the Thirty Years' War to a mere troopers' skirmish. From the middle of the seventh to the end of the fifteenth century Moors and Goths kept at it, hammer and tongs, and the efficiency of the Moorish scimitars may be inferred from the tradition about the doom of the paladins who had followed the Cid in his eighteen campaigns, and the last words of their chief: "It is not that I expected to win every battle," said old Ruy Diaz, when he counted the survivors of a murderous fight, "but I cannot help noticing the spite of Death in picking out our heroes."

Yet that ominous process of elimination was a trifle compared with the three hundred years' exodus that lured the stoutest and pluckiest sons of Spain to the bonanza fields of the great transAtlantic colonies; a country smaller than Peru furnishing emigrants enough to colonize an area of 5,500,000 square miles-nay, restock it again and again, as wars with aborigines and foreign rivals exhausted the preceding instalments. No wonder that the population of the parent country dwindled from 29,000,000 to 14,000,000, and that in many communities the remnant shrunk to a mere caput mortuum of invalids and grannies of both sexes.

"Keep out here, Tom," a Vermont village elder snorted at sight of his son; "old men for council, youngsters for war; we're trying

a test case here, and shall tell you if there are any arrests to be made."

Tom, according to a correspondent of the "Detroit Free Press," was a callow youth of fifty-callow at least on top of his head, all the younger males of the little hamlet having departed for the adventure land of the Far West.

Yet, what are, or even were, the temptations of Texas and Oklahoma compared with those of the Spanish-American wonderlands, Eldorados and Edens of the tropics?

Rarely less, and often more, than 200,000 fortune seekers started from Spanish sea ports, year after year, till the old country became a ethnological ruin, a political King Lear, bankrupted by the endowment of twenty-six more or less ungrateful daughters.

And, as misfortunes rarely come alone, the sanitary blessings inherited from the civilization of the Moors were gradually forfeited by the activity of inquisitorial fanatics. Llorente, in his chronicle of the Casa Santa, mentions scores of cases of converts from Mohammedanism incurring trouble by their relapse into the hygienic habits of their former creed. If they questioned the wholesomeness of pork they were fined or lugged off to prison, and released only after their health had been impaired beyond the remedial influence of dietetic measures. If they rebuked a drunkard they were mobbed by a gang of Yahoos anxious to advertise their dissent from the tenets of the Koran; nay, an old citizen of Seville was impeached and tortured under the pretext of suspicions founded upon the complaint of a malicious servant girl, who reported that her employer was in the habit of taking secret baths, and betrayed such an aversion to swine's flesh that she had been obliged to purchase garbanzas (pork sausages) out of her own scant wages. The defendant proved that his employment as a coppersmith made ablutions a sanitary necessity, and got several trinitarian physicians to attest the injurious influence of rank meats upon a feeble stomach; but his plea was recorded as an additional offence, and when a wealthy friend at last effected his liberation he was so worn out by brutal ill-treatment that he had to drag himself home on crutches.

Nay, Henry Buckle, in his "History of Civilization," quotes evidence in support of the still more astounding fact that thousands of public and private baths were destroyed by order of the Inquisi

tion.

They may have thought it expedient to obliterate all memorials of the vanquished race, but their personal habits often justified the