y.]

Flushed with the success of many victories, we challenged the slum to a
fight to the finish in 1897, and bade it come on. It came on. On our
side fought the bravest and best. The man who marshalled the citizen
forces for their candidate had been foremost in building homes, in
erecting baths for the people, in directing the self-sacrificing labors
of the oldest and worthiest of the agencies for improving the condition
of the poor. With him battled men who had given lives of patient study
and effort to the cause of helping their fellow-men. Shoulder to
shoulder with them stood the thoughtful workingman from the East Side
tenement. The slum, too, marshalled its forces. Tammany produced its
notes. It pointed to the increased tax rate, showed what it had cost to
build schools and parks and to clean house, and called it criminal
recklessness. The issue was made sharp and clear. The war cry of the
slum was characteristic: "To hell with reform!" We all remember the
result. Politics interfered, and turned victory into defeat. We were
beaten. I shall never forget that election night. I walked home through
the Bowery in the midnight hour, and saw it gorging itself, like a
starved wolf, upon the promise of the morrow. Drunken men and women sat
in every doorway, howling ribald songs and curses. Hard faces I had not
seen for years showed themselves about the dives. The mob made merry
after its fashion. The old days were coming back. Reform was dead, and
decency with it.

[Illustration: "In the hallway I ran across two children, little tots,
who were inquiring their way to 'the commissioner.'"]

A year later, I passed that same way on the night of election.[14] The
scene was strangely changed. The street was unusually quiet for such a
time. Men stood in groups about the saloons, and talked in whispers,
with serious faces. The name of Roosevelt was heard on every hand. The
dives were running, but there was no shouting, and violence was
discouraged. When, on the following day, I met the proprietor of one of
the oldest concerns in the Bowery,--which, while doing a legitimate
business, caters necessarily to its crowds, and therefore sides with
them,--he told me with bitter reproach how he had been stricken in
pocket. A gambler had just been in to see him, who had come on from the
far West, in anticipation of a wide-open town, and had got all ready to
open a house in the Tenderloin. "He brought $40,000 to put in the
business, and h