SOURCE; A review of The Battle with the Slum, in The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 11, March, 1903, pp. 334-35.

In the following essay, West reviews The Battle with the Slum.

This latest work of Mr. Riis [The Battle with the Slum] supplements his How the Other Half Lives and A Ten Years' War, and completes the history of a struggle to improve conditions in the tenement-house districts of New York city. The book describes the work of the Tenement-House Commissions of 1894 and 1900, and the voluntary citizens' committee of 1898, which led up to the creation of the present Tenement-House Department; but it is far from being a statistical report. It is rather an intimately personal account of the awful conditions which prevailed in the tenement-house districts, with their population of over two millions, and of what has been done, and against what odds, to purge the city. Such triumphs...