ut I overthrew the hideous creature, and
sat on his neck as on a throne. In Dover Street I was shackled with a
hundred chains of disadvantage, but with one free hand I planted
little seeds, right there in the mud of shame, that blossomed into the
honeyed rose of widest freedom. In Dover Street there was often no
loaf on the table, but the hand of some noble friend was ever in mine.
The night in Dover Street was rent with the cries of wrong, but the
thunders of truth crashed through the pitiful clamor and died out in
prophetic silences.

Outwardly, Dover Street is a noisy thoroughfare cut through a South
End slum, in every essential the same as Wheeler Street. Turn down any
street in the slums, at random, and call it by whatever name you
please, you will observe there the same fashions of life, death, and
endurance. Every one of those streets is a rubbish heap of damaged
humanity, and it will take a powerful broom and an ocean of soapsuds
to clean it out.

Dover Street is intersected, near its eastern end, where we lived, by
Harrison Avenue. That street is to the South End what Salem Street is
to the North End. It is the heart of the South End ghetto, for the
greater part of its length; although its northern end belongs to the
realm of Chinatown. Its multifarious business bursts through the
narrow shop doors, and overruns the basements, the sidewalk, the
street itself, in pushcarts and open-air stands. Its multitudinous
population bursts through the greasy tenement doors, and floods the
corridors, the doorsteps, the gutters, the side streets, pushing in
and out among the pushcarts, all day long and half the night besides.

Rarely as Harrison Avenue is caught asleep, even more rarely is it
found clean. Nothing less than a fire or flood would cleanse this
street. Even Passover cannot quite accomplish this feat. For although
the tenements may be scrubbed to their remotest corners, on this one
occasion, the cleansing stops at the curbstone. A great deal of the
filthy rubbish accumulated in a year is pitched into the street, often
through the windows; and what the ashman on his daily round does not
remove is left to be trampled to powder, in which form it steals back
into the houses from which it was so lately removed.

The City Fathers provide soap and water for the slums, in the form of
excellent schools, kindergartens, and branch libraries. And there they
stop: at the curbstone of the people's life. They cleanse and
d