and leave the housing of the mass of the people as bad in many respects as it was before. The product of private enterprise, then, is insufficient in quantity and inferior in quality." These remarks are no doubt applicable, to some extent at least, to the results of private enterprise in our own cities, except in those cases where men of means have built model houses from philanthropic motives, rather than as an investment. It is hardly necessary to insist upon the importance of supplying the laboring classes of a city with sanitary homes at reasonable rentals. A house famine and excessive rentals must infallibly result in overcrowding, with all the evil consequences to the health and morals of the occupants which attend such overcrowding. Upon this subject I desire again to quote from "The Housing Handbook": "Taking England and Wales as a whole, the census of 1891 showed 34 million people living in overcrowded dwellings, while 660,000 people had only one room to live in. Unfortunately, the census returns in England do not give the total number of rooms available in workingclass dwellings; but in Scotland we see by the census of 1901 that there were only 3,022,077 rooms for 969,318 families, including all classes, or an average of three rooms to each family, the total population thus housed being 4,472,000. In 1891 fifty per cent of these were 'overcrowded' on the basis of the census definition. "Two-thirds of the present population of London have houses containing not more than four rooms, and these in most cases without adequate sanitary conveniences, open spaces, sunlight and air. In 1891 about 900,000 people (equal to the entire population at the beginning of the 19th century) were living in overcrowded rooms. At least 386,000 had to sleep, wash, dress, cook, eat, live and die in that abomination, the 'one-room dwelling.' "In Glasgow, the second city of the Empire, and the modern municipality, things are worse. No less than one-fifth of the people live in one-room dwellings; more than half the people have houses with not more than two rooms; 87 per cent have three rooms and less, while 90 per cent of the new houses built during the last three years have not more than three rooms. "In Edinburgh, the modern Athens, more than half the homes consist of one and two rooms, while in some districts, such as the Canongate and S. Giles, this proportion is as high as 70 per cent. "This enormous amount of overcrowding not only enables high rents to be obtained, but by the increased wear and tear of the houses, by the strain it imposes on inadequate sanitary appliances and resources, by the dirty and unsanitary habits it engenders, quickly drags down even those houses which in themselves are structurally sanitary when not overcrowded, and thus creates new slums faster than the old ones can be improved, besides establishing among numbers of young people a low standard of home life and sanitation which years of education will be required to eradicate. "Not only in the United Kingdom, but in most of the great cities of the world, the people are overcrowded on areas as well as in rooms. This arises in two ways. In the first place, especially in England, an inadequate amount of open ground space is left round each building; and, in the second place, by means of piling up rooms several stories high, light is obstructed and the air is polluted much more quickly than it can be removed or purified. The latter system prevails more in Glasgow and in continental, cities than it does in London, and this partly explains why Paris, with only 44 per cent of its population overcrowded in rooms, has a higher death rate than London with 20 per cent overcrowded. It is a very significant fact that, in spite of strict supervision, careful structural sanitary arrangements, and a picked population, the death rate in model block dwellings in London is often as much as 30 per cent higher than the average of all classes of dwellings in the adjoining county of Surrey, while deaths from phthisis, scarlet fever and diphtheria have been often higher in these model blocks than the average of London-slums and overcrowded rooms and old houses included." It is a well-established fact that infant mortality is very much greater in overcrowded houses. Mr. Thompson says: "Infant mortality varies almost arithmetically with housing conditions. Although children under five are only one-ninth of the population, they furnish one-third of the deaths." That the death rate in cities is largely influenced by the number of occupants to a room has been repeatedly demonstrated by sanitary statistics. Mr. Russell in his statistics of Glasgow (1871 to 1880) found that the general mortality was 21.7 per thousand, when the average occupancy per room was 1.31; when the average was 2.05 for each bedroom the mortality increased to 26.6 per thousand. It can readily be understood that the closer people are crowded together the greater will be the liability for the transmission of infectious diseases, such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, etc. And when they live in an atmosphere which is vitiated by the emanations from the lungs and bodies of human beings, with insufficient ventilation and a deficient supply of sunlight-nature's great disinfecting agent-their susceptibility to infection is greatly increased. In his investigations made in Budapest, Korosi found that the mortality from infectious diseases was 20 per thousand when there were only two occupants per room; where the number was from three to five the mortality was 29 per thousand, and where it was from six to ten the mortality increased to 32 per thousand. In the City of Washington the death rate among the colored population, in 1875, was 42.86 per thousand. In 1906 it had fallen to 28.81 per thousand. Among the whites it was 21.04 in 1875, and in 1906 it had fallen to 15.16. To what extent this decline in the death rate is due to improvement in housing conditions it is impossible to say, but no doubt there has been some improvement, and this is one of the factors which accounts for the gradual reduction of our death rate from the disgracefully high figures of twenty-five or thirty years ago. We cannot do better than to quote here the forceful language of President Roosevelt in his message to Congress, in December, 1904: "In pursuing the set plan to make the City of Washington an example to other American municipalities, several points should be kept in mind by the legislators. In the first place, the people of this country should clearly understand that no amount of industrial prosperity, and, above all, no leadership in international industrial competition, can in any way atone for the sapping of the vitality of those who are usually spoken of as the working classes. The farmers, the mechanics, the skilled and unskilled laborers, the small shopkeepers, make up the bulk of the population of any country; and upon their well-being, generation after generation, the well-being of the country and the race depends. Rapid development in wealth and industrial leadership is a good thing, but only if it goes hand in hand with improvement and not deterioration, physical and moral. The overcrowding of cities and the draining of country districts are unhealthy and even dangerous symptoms in our modern life. "We should not permit overcrowding in cities. In certain European cities it is provided by law that the population of towns shall not be allowed to exceed a very limited density for a given area, so that the increase in density must be continually pushed back into a broad zone around the center of the town, this zone having great avenues or parks within it. The death rate statistics show a terrible increase in mortality, and especially in infant mortality, in overcrowded tenements. The poorest families in tenement houses live in one room, and it appears that in these one-room tenements the average death rate for a number of given cities at home and abroad is about twice what it is in a tworoom tenement, four times what it is in a three-room tenement, and eight times what it is in a tenement consisting of four rooms or over. These figures vary somewhat for different cities, but they approximate in each city those given above; and in all cases the increase of mortality, and especially of infant mortality, with the decrease in the number of rooms used by the family and with the consequent overcrowding is startling. The slum exacts a heavy total of death from those who dwell therein; and this is the case not merely in the great crowded slums of high buildings in New York and Chicago, but in the alley slums of Washington. In Washington people cannot afford to ignore the harm that this causes. No Christian and civilized community can afford to show a happy-go-lucky lack of concern for the youth of to-day; for, if so, the community will have to pay a terrible penalty of financial burden and social degradation in the to-morrow. "Several considerations suggest the need of a systematic investigation into and improvement of housing conditions in Washington. The hidden residential alleys are breeding grounds of vice and disease, and should be opened into minor streets. For a number of years influential citizens have joined with the District Commissioners in the vain endeavor to secure laws permitting the condemnation of insanitary dwellings. The local death rates, especially from preventable diseases, are so unduly high as to suggest that the exceptional wholesomeness of Washington's better sections is offset by bad conditions in her poorer neighborhoods. A special 'Commission on Housing and Health Conditions in the National Capital' would not only bring about the reformation of existing evils, but would also formulate an appropriate building code to protect the city from mammoth brick tenements and other evils which threaten to develop here as they have in other cities. That the nation's Capital should be made a model for other municipalities is an ideal which appeals to all patriotic citizens everywhere, and such a special commission might map out and organize the city's future development in lines of civic social service, just as Major L'Enfant and the recent Park Commission planned the arrangement of her streets and parks." II. HOUSING CONDITIONS IN WASHINGTON. The National Capital was evidently intended to be a city of homes. The original lots are of generous dimensions and front upon broad streets and avenues. These lots provided ample room for separate houses, with space for yards in the front and rear, and the squares were laid out in such a manner as to give access, by alleys, to the rear of each lot. This plan probably had in view the location of stables on |