rate means as the Marches. In my zeal for truth
I did not distinguish between reality and actuality in this or other
matters--that is, one was as precious to me as the other. But the types
here portrayed are as true as ever they were, though the world in
which they were finding their habitat is wonderfully, almost incredibly
different. Yet it is not wholly different, for a young literary pair
now adventuring in New York might easily parallel the experience of the
Marches with their own, if not for so little money; many phases of
New York housing are better, but all are dearer. Other aspects of the
material city have undergone a transformation much more wonderful. I
find that in my book its population is once modestly spoken of as two
millions, but now in twenty years it is twice as great, and the grandeur
as well as grandiosity of its forms is doubly apparent. The transitional
public that then moped about in mildly tinkling horse-cars is now
hurried back and forth in clanging trolleys, in honking and whirring
motors; the Elevated road which was the last word of speed is undermined
by the Subway, shooting its swift shuttles through the subterranean woof
of the city's haste. From these feet let the witness infer our whole
massive Hercules, a bulk that sprawls and stretches beyond the rivers
through the tunnels piercing their beds and that towers into the skies
with innumerable tops--a Hercules blent of Briareus and Cerberus, but
not so bad a monster as it seemed then to threaten becoming.

Certain hopes of truer and better conditions on which my heart was fixed
twenty years ago are not less dear, and they are by no means touched
with despair, though they have not yet found the fulfilment which I
would then have prophesied for them. Events have not wholly played them
false; events have not halted, though they have marched with a slowness
that might affect a younger observer as marking time. They who were then
mindful of the poor have not forgotten them, and what is better the poor
have not often forgotten themselves in violences such as offered me the
material of tragedy and pathos in my story. In my quality of artist I
could not regret these, and I gratefully realize that they offered
me the opportunity of a more strenuous action, a more impressive
catastrophe than I could have achieved without them. They tended to give
the whole fable dignity and doubtless made for its success as a book.
As a serial it had crept a sluggis