The Workingman and Social Problems Author:Charles Stelzle Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE WORKINGMAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT Stories of "Darkest England" and "China's Millions" appall us. But there are seven hundred thousand people h... more »uddled together on that little tail of Manhattan Island with which many of us are familiar. This is the most densely populated part of the world. The population is more than twice as dense as the densest part of London. Imagine three hundred and fifty thousand people to the square mile. If they should become suddenly seized with a desire to get down into the street there would not be room for them to stand. Within one hundred yards of the Pro Cathedral there are ten thousand people, packed solidly in six and seven story tenement-houses. In another section of fifty acres there are fifty thousand people, about ten thousand more than there are in the entire state of Nevada, with its over seventy million acres. There is a single block on the west side of New York which contains seven thousand persons. To pack away this teeming population on one block the tenements are built so close together as to look like one gigantic house six hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide. In the minds of the average reporter, and the faddist who thinks it great fun to work among the poor, any crowded section of the city is a "slum." The honest, hard-working people who are compelled to live in the great tenements of our cities repudiate the term. These overpopulated parts of our cities are inhabited by the industrious workingman and his family. Here they are hidden away until a Jacob Riis tells us "How the Other Half Lives." The Federation of East Side Workers, organized by Dr. John Bancroft Devins, undertook to renovate tenement property during one winter in order to get employment for the men who were out of work. I remember that f...« less