and its worst plague spots cleaned out, the death-rate of New York came
down from 26.32 per 1000 inhabitants in 1887 to 19.53 in 1897. Inasmuch
as a round half million was added to its population within the ten
years, it requires little figuring to show that the number whose lives
were literally saved by reform would people a city of no mean
proportions. The extraordinary spell of hot weather in the summer of
1896, when the temperature hung for ten consecutive days in the
nineties, with days and nights of extreme discomfort, brought out the
full meaning of this. While many were killed by sunstroke, the
population as a whole was shown to have acquired, in better hygienic
surroundings, a much greater power of resistance. It yielded slowly to
the heat. Where two days had been sufficient, in former years, to send
the death-rate up, it now took five; and the infant mortality remained
low throughout the dreadful trial. Perhaps the substitution of beer for
whiskey as a summer drink had something to do with it; but Colonel
Waring's broom and unpolitical sanitation had more. Since it spared him
so many voters, the politician ought to have been grateful for this; but
he was not. Death-rates are not as good political arguments as tax
rates, we found out. In the midst of it all, a policeman whom I knew
went to his Tammany captain to ask if Good Government Clubs were
political clubs within the meaning of the law which forbade policemen
joining such. The answer he received set me to thinking: "Yes, the
meanest, worst kind of political clubs, they are." Yet they had done
nothing worse than to save the babies, the captain's with the rest.

The landlord read the signs better, and ran to cover till the storm
should blow over. Houses that had hardly known repairs since they were
built were put in order with all speed. All over the city, he made
haste to set his house to rights, lest it be seized or brought to the
bar in other ways. The Good Government Clubs had their hands full that
year (1896-97). They made war upon the dark hall in the double-decker,
and upon the cruller bakery. They compelled the opening of small parks,
or the condemnation of sites for them anyway, exposed the abuses of the
civil courts, the "poor man's courts," urged on the building of new
schools, cleaned up in the Tombs prison and hastened the demolition of
the wicked old pile, and took a hand in evolving a sensible and humane
system of dealing with the young vagra