c and great conflagrations swept through Akron, Buffalo and
Hartford. Garbage collection systems broke down and no attempt was made
to clear the streets of snow. Broken watermains, gaspipes and sewers
were followed by typhus and typhoid and smallpox, flux, cholera and
bubonic plague. The hundreds of thousands of deaths relieved only in
small degree the overcrowding; for the epidemics displaced those
refugees sheltered in the schoolhouses, long since closed, when these
were made auxiliary to the inadequate hospitals.

The strangely inappropriate flowering of culture, so profuse the year
before, no longer bloomed. A few invincible enthusiasts, mufflered and
raincoated, still bore the icy chill of the concert hall, a quorum of
painters besieged the artist supply stores for the precious remaining
tubes of burntumber and scarletlake, while it was presumed that in
traditionally unheated garrets orthodox poets nourished their muse on
pencil erasers. But all enthusiasm was individual property, the reaction
of single persons with excess adrenalin. No common interests united
doctor and stockbroker, steelworker and truckdriver, laborer and
laundryman, except common fear of the Grass, briefly dormant but ever in
the background of all minds. The stream of novels, plays, and poems
dried up; publishers, amazed that what had been profitable the year
before was no longer so, were finally convinced and stopped printing
anything remotely literate; even the newspapers limped along crippledly,
their presses breaking down hourly, their circulation and coverage alike
dubious.

The streets were no more safe at night than in sixteenth century London.
Even in the greatest cities the lighting was erratic and in the smaller
ones it had been abandoned entirely. Holdups by individuals had been
practically given up, perhaps because of the uncertainty of any footpad
getting away with his loot before being hijacked by another, but small
compact gangs made life and property unsafe at night. Tempers were
extraordinarily short; a surprised housebreaker was likely to add
battery, mayhem and arson to his crimes, and altercations which commonly
would have terminated in nothing more violent than lurid epithets now
frequently ended in murder.

Since too many of the homeless took advantage of the law to commit petty
offenses and so secure some kind of shelter for themselves, all law
enforcement below the level of capital crimes went by default. Prisoners
wer