vides carriages for the poor, who
otherwise could not have them. It may be too much to say that all the
relatives and friends who ride in the carriages provided by the
alderman's bounty vote for him, but they are certainly influenced by his
kindness, and talk of his virtues during the long hours of the ride back
and forth from the suburban cemetery. A man who would ask at such a time
where all the money thus spent comes from would be considered sinister.
The tendency to speak lightly of the faults of the dead and to judge
them gently is transferred to the living, and many a man at such a time
has formulated a lenient judgment of political corruption, and has heard
kindly speeches which he has remembered on election day. "Ah, well, he
has a big Irish heart. He is good to the widow and the fatherless." "He
knows the poor better than the big guns who are always talking about
civil service and reform."

Indeed, what headway can the notion of civic purity, of honesty of
administration make against this big manifestation of human
friendliness, this stalking survival of village kindness? The notions of
the civic reformer are negative and impotent before it. Such an alderman
will keep a standing account with an undertaker, and telephone every
week, and sometimes more than once, the kind of funeral he wishes
provided for a bereaved constituent, until the sum may roll up into
"hundreds a year." He understands what the people want, and ministers
just as truly to a great human need as the musician or the artist. An
attempt to substitute what we might call a later standard was made at
one time when a delicate little child was deserted in the Hull-House
nursery. An investigation showed that it had been born ten days
previously in the Cook County hospital, but no trace could be found of
the unfortunate mother. The little child lived for several weeks, and
then, in spite of every care, died. It was decided to have it buried by
the county authorities, and the wagon was to arrive at eleven o'clock;
about nine o'clock in the morning the rumor of this awful deed reached
the neighbors. A half dozen of them came, in a very excited state of
mind, to protest. They took up a collection out of their poverty with
which to defray a funeral. The residents of Hull-House were then
comparatively new in the neighborhood and did not realize that they were
really shocking a genuine moral sentiment of the community. In their
crudeness they instanced the c