do about this working of heredity against labor, except as
     by the slow and gradual improvement of mankind these low
     strata of existences are lifted up to a higher plane. 
     Meanwhile we must blame less harshly and work a little more
     earnestly to better the human stock.

The environment of labor handicaps still further this organic deficiency.  In most of our great cities the homes of the workingmen are shockingly unwholesome; unsunned, badly drained, overcrowded.  The tenements of New York are enough alone to take the life out of labor.  City factories often are not much better.  The quality of the food sold in the poorer sections of our cities—­meat, bread, milk, etc.—­is defectively nutritious, even where it is not positively harmful.  The sanitary conditions are thus against labor.

This could be largely reflected by the State and city authorities, and ought to be rectified in simple justice to society at large, which is now so heavily burdened by the manifold evils bred under such conditions.  Government guards carefully the rights both of land and capital by an immense amount of legislation and administration.  Has not labor a fair claim to an equal solicitude on the part of the State?  Health is the laborer’s source of wealth, but it is by no means so farefully looked after as are the resources of the other two factors of production.  It is only within the last three years that in New York we have had a satisfactory tenement-house law or a fair administration of any law bearing on this evil.  There ought to be the exercise of some such large wisdom as led the city of Glasgow to spend $7,000,000 in reconstructing three thousand of the worst tenements of that city, with a consequent reduction of the death rate from 54 per thousand to 29 per thousand, and with a corresponding decrease in pauperism and crime.

     To this end our municipal governments should be taken out
     of party politics and made the corporation business that
     they are in German cities.

We have in none of the States of our Union any such legislation as that of the thorough system of factory laws in England, and we ought to supply the lack promptly.  Whatever may be said as to interference on the part of legislation with the rights of capital, the sufficient answer is that the whole advance of society has been a constant interference on the part of legislation with the merely natural action of the law of supply and demand; and that only thus has England, for example, secured the immense amelioration in the condition of the problem of labor and capital which marks her state to-day.

It can be said also in this connection that if Government has one business more peculiarly her own than another, it is to look after the class that most needs looking after; and that not simply from the interest of the class itself, which