People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 September 1896 — Poverty and Filth of Chicago. [ARTICLE]

Poverty and Filth of Chicago.

In the Chicago Record of Sept. 23, in the correspondence of William E. Curtis, there appears an illustration of abject squallor in a so-called tavern for the poorer class of farmers in Mexico. It shows hogs and men occupying the same , quarters, and the article speaks of the smell that arises from the abundance of filth. Bad as is the description it cannot compare with what discovered in every division of Chicago. In the columns of the Record but a few years ago there appeared the testimony of its own reporters of conditions in the every day life of Chicago that cannot be paralleled in degree of poverty, dirt and offensive odors. The writer distinctly remembers reading a description of four families of fifteen persons in all occupy ing one room 20 feet square as their sole accommodations. A chalk line designated the partitiqn, and in that room the entire four families lived, cooking, eating, sleeping, and doing so in the most wretched uncleanliOess, the odor being so oppressive as to sicken and drive visitors from the place. Nor are such instances uncommon; it is not placing it too-strong to say that the conditions of the lower classes of Chicago are as deplorable and as degenerated as are those of the Mexican Indian farmers as portrayed in the Record cartoons.