e Other Half Lives," thirteen years ago. Some of it
we came plodding, and some at full speed; some of it in the face of
every obstacle that could be thrown in our way, wresting victory from
defeat at every step; some of it with the enemy on the run. Take it all
together, it is a long way. Much of it will not have to be travelled
over again. The engine of municipal progress once started as it has been
in New York, may slip many a cog with Tammany as the engineer; it may
even be stopped for a season; but it can never be made to work backward.
Even Tammany knows that, and gropes desperately for a new hold, a
certificate of character. In the last election (1901) she laid loud
claim to having built many new schools, though she had done little more
than to carry out the plans of the previous reform administration,
where they could not be upset. As a matter of fact we had fallen behind
again, sadly. But even the claim was significant.

How long we strove for those schools, to no purpose! Our arguments, our
anger, the anxious pleading of philanthropists who saw the young on the
East Side going to ruin, the warning year after year of the
superintendent of schools that the compulsory education law was but an
empty mockery where it was most needed, the knocking of uncounted
thousands of children for whom there was no room,--uncounted in sober
fact; there was not even a way of finding out how many were
adrift,[13]--brought only the response that the tax rate must be kept
down. Kept down it was. "Waste" was successfully averted at the spigot;
at the bunghole it went on unchecked. In a swarming population like that
you must have either schools or jails, and the jails waxed fat with the
overflow. The East Side, that had been orderly, became a hotbed of child
crime. And when, in answer to the charge made by a legislative committee
(1895) that the father forced his child into the shop, on a perjured age
certificate, to labor when he ought to have been at play, that father,
bent and heavy-eyed with unceasing toil, flung back the charge with the
bitter reproach that we gave him no other choice, that it was either the
street or the shop for his boy, and that perjury for him was cheaper
than the ruin of the child, we were mute. What, indeed, was there to
say? The crime was ours, not his. That was seven years ago. Once since
then have we been where we could count the months to the time when every
child that knocked should find a seat in our s