ubscription for ball-tickets or
repairs. It was well understood, and generally pretty plainly expressed,
that those who refused to pay might expect to be burned out or neglected.
The result of it all was a general fear of the firemen, a most degrading
and contemptible subservience to them by politicians of all kinds, a
terrible and general growth and spread of turbulence and coarse vulgarity
among youth, and finally, such a prevalence of conflagration that no one
who owned a house could hear the awful tones of the bell of Independence
Hall without terror. Fires were literally of nightly occurrence, and
that they were invariably by night was due to the incendiary "runner." A
slight examination of the newspapers and cheap broadside literature of
that time will amply confirm all that I here state. "Jakey" was the
typical fireman; he was the brutal hero of a vulgar play, and the ideal
of nineteen youths out of twenty. For a generation or more all society
felt the degrading influences of this rowdyism in almost every circle--for
there were among the vast majority of men not very many who respected,
looked up to, or cared for anything really cultured or refined. I have a
large collection of the popular songs of Philadelphia of that time, in
all of which there is a striving downwards into blackguardism and
brutality, vileness and ignorance, which has no parallel in the
literature of any other nation. The French of the _Pere Duchene_ school
may be nastier, and, as regards aristocrats, as bloody, but for general
all-round _vulgarity_, the state of morals developed among the people at
the time of which I speak was literally without its like. It is very
strange that Pliny also speaks of the turbulence or rowdyism of the
firemen of Rome.

I remember that even in Walnut Street, below Thirteenth Street, before my
father's house (this being then by far the most respectable portion of
Philadelphia), it happened several nights in succession that rival fire-
companies, running side by side, fought as they ran, with torches and
knives, while firing pistols. There was a young lady named Mary Bicking,
who lived near us. I asked her one day if she had ever seen a man shot;
and when she answered "No," I replied, "Why don't you look out of your
window some night and see one?"

The southern part of the city was a favourite battleground, and I can
remember hearing ladies who lived in Pine Street describe how, on Sunday
summer afternoo