case it carries the
situation by assault. When the gang wants a thing, the easiest way seems
to it always to take it. There was an explosion in a Fifth Street
tenement, one winter's night, that threw twenty families into a wild
panic, and injured two of the tenants badly. There was much mystery
about it, until it came out that the housekeeper had had a "run in" with
the gang in the block. It wanted club room in the house, and she would
not let it in. Beaten, it avenged itself in characteristic fashion by
leaving a package of gunpowder on the stairs, where she would be sure to
find it when she went the rounds with her candle to close up. That was a
gang of the kind I have reference to, headed straight for Albany. And
what is more, it will get there, unless things change greatly. The
gunpowder was just a "bluff" to frighten the housekeeper, an instalment
of the kind of politics it meant to play when it got its chance.

There was "nothing against" this gang except a probable row with the
saloon keeper, since it applied elsewhere for house room. Not every gang
has a police record of theft and "slugging" beyond the early encounters
of the street. "Our honorable leader" is not always the captain of a
band of cutthroats. He is the honorary president of the "social club"
that bears his name, and he counts for something in the ward. But the
ethical standards do not differ. "Do others, or they will do you,"
felicitously adapted from Holy Writ for the use of the slum, and the
classic war-cry, "To the victor the spoils," made over locally to read,
"I am not in politics for my health," still interpret the creed of the
political as of the "slugging" gang. They draw their inspiration from
the same source. Of what gang politics mean every large city in our
country has had its experience. New York is no exception. History on the
subject is being made yet, in sight of us all.

[Illustration: Children's Playground. Good Citizenship at the Bottom of
this Barrel.]

Our business with the gang, however, is in the making of it. Take now
the showing of the reformatory,[32] to which I have before made
reference, and see what light it throws upon the matter: 77.80 per cent
of prisoners with no moral sense, or next to none, yet more than that
proportion possessed of "good natural mental capacity," which is to say
that they had the means of absorbing it from their environment, if there
had been any to absorb. Bad homes sent half (47.79) of all p