[In the following essay, a reviewer for The Nation offers a critique of The Battle with the Slum.]

This book [The Battle with the Slum] would have attracted more attention than it has, but for the fact that most, if not all, of it is a republication. After writing How the Other Half Lives, the author published, three years ago, A Ten Years' War, a series of papers intended to account for the progress of "the battle with the slum" since the first volume appeared. Since that time, as he hints in his preface, a good many things have happened, and he has been occupied, not only in the conflict itself, but incidentally in writing about it. In the present volume he has passed the later stages of the conflict in review, "retaining all that still applied of the old volume and adding as much more." The "stories" are reprinted from the Century, and these, he adds, are fact, not fiction. The volume is copiously illustrated, and has plenty of real interest without the pictures.

This interest centres about two points: first, the author, and, secondly, what it is the fashion to call the "point of view" of the cause he advocates. Mr. Riis is, of course, an enthusiast, and in his enthusiasm fails to see that a much more restrained way of writing would be more effective for his purposes than that which he employs. But his enthusiasm is genuine, and carries conviction. He is so evidently honest in his sympathy for human suffering and ignorance, and even for human perversity—his character shines so transparently through what he says—that the most critical (or, as he would say, most pessimistic) nature is forced first to attend and then to follow. "What the Fight is About," the first half-dozen pages of the book, sums up its whole theory. This theory, to put it in our own words, is that the slum is the measure of civilization. So far from its being tolerable, as those who went before thought, that squalor and filth and vice and crime should exist in great masses and plaguespots, side by side with wealth and education and order and happiness, the new theory is that, in a civilized community, the slum has no business to exist at all; that it can be extirpated, and that if it is not extirpated, the crime lies at the door of the prosperous classes who suffer it to go on. Now when we look at the slums of New York, we look at the worst case in point in the world, for here the slums have been permitted not only to fester and breed their kind, but to give a government to the city. Tammany, which thirty years ago meant only robbery, came in a generation to mean a government devoted to the propagation of vice and crime for private gain—probably the nearest approach to a "hell on earth" yet seen. Even Tammany never quite attained its ideal, but it came near enough to show us that it would have included, when perfect, a police dedicated to the work of deriving a revenue from the licensing not merely of bawds and pimps, but robbers and murderers; a fire department conniving in the work of the police by the spread of fires; a health board propagating disease; a building department aiding the main purpose of the government by selling licenses to violate the laws designed to secure life and limb and prevent the spread of pestilence—all directed to pouring a stream of money into the pocket of the man who managed the ingenious machinery by which he enslaved, plundered, and debauched his principality.

This system it is which has produced the New York pessimist for whom Mr. Riis has so little sympathy; fortunate for us if it has produced enthusiasts like Mr. Riis, who, seeing, as he says, that "we win or we perish," is ready for the battle. His battle with the slum is really only another side of the struggle for good government in which even "pessimists" now know they must take part or perish. Everybody cannot be an enthusiast; but everybody feels the force of inspiration, and Mr. Riis is inspired by that sympathy for the poor and weak and unsuccessful which drives men, not to alms-giving or psalm-singing, but to daily action against evil and its causes. The motive to which he appeals is in the end religious:

"We shall win, for we are not letting things be, the way our fathers did. But it will be a running fight, and it is not going to be won in two years, or in ten, or in twenty. For all that, we must keep on fighting, content if in our time we avert the punishment that waits upon the third and the fourth generation of those who forget the brotherhood. As a man does in dealing with his brother, so it is the way of God that his children shall reap, that through toil and tears we may make out the lesson which sums up all the commandments and alone can make the earth fit for the kingdom that is to come."