cigars in tenement-houses, showed that they had no idea what it was
that they were deciding. Imagine the "hallowed" associations of a "home"
consisting of one room where two families, one of them with a boarder,
live, eat, and work! This decision completely blocked tenement-house
reform legislation in New York for a score of years, and hampers it to
this day. It was one of the most serious setbacks which the cause of
industrial and social progress and reform ever received.

I had been brought up to hold the courts in especial reverence. The
people with whom I was most intimate were apt to praise the courts for
just such decisions as this, and to speak of them as bulwarks against
disorder and barriers against demagogic legislation. These were the same
people with whom the judges who rendered these decisions were apt
to foregather at social clubs, or dinners, or in private life. Very
naturally they all tended to look at things from the same standpoint. Of
course it took more than one experience such as this Tenement Cigar Case
to shake me out of the attitude in which I was brought up. But various
decisions, not only of the New York court but of certain other State
courts and even of the United States Supreme Court, during the quarter
of a century following the passage of this tenement-house legislation,
did at last thoroughly wake me to the actual fact. I grew to realize
that all that Abraham Lincoln had said about the Dred Scott decision
could be said with equal truth and justice about the numerous decisions
which in our own day were erected as bars across the path of social
reform, and which brought to naught so much of the effort to secure
justice and fair dealing for workingmen and workingwomen, and for plain
citizens generally.

Some of the wickedness and inefficiency in public life was then
displayed in simpler fashion than would probably now be the case. Once