Page:Americanisation - a letter to John Stuart Mill.djvu/13

 revenue levied in the city of New York alone is now ten times greater than the entire sum raised by the Government of the whole American Union at the end of last century. At that time the average amount paid by each inhabitant of New York was about 4s. per head, man, woman, and child. Last year it was nearly 80s. per head; showing an increase in the pressure of local taxation, within that period, of 2,000 per cent.!

When we inquire into the causes of the increased mortality in the "Empire City" of the Union, whose journalism inspires public sentiment, and manufactures public opinion for the "Model Republic," we find that one of the chief sources of the evil has been the unchecked progress of what is called "the tenement system," a wretched sort of barracks on a gigantic scale, in which some three or four hundred thousands of the working classes of New York find lodgings. Last November, when rumours of the approach of cholera had awakened public attention to the fact that so many nurseries of pestilence were growing up in the very midst of the city, the New York Tribune gave a report of "A Tour among the Tenements,"from which I take the following graphic passage, in order to show you how much more powerful the aggregate greed of an unlimited democracy is likely to become than "the aggregate