traint and
courage. And in their weariness and their patience lies the full
solemnity of the scene. The morning crowd, even on the same wooden
platform at City Hall, is different. The morning crowd is not so firmly
knit together. You catch individual and local peculiarities. You feel
that there are men and women here from Harlem, and others from Long
Island, and others from Westchester and the Bronx. They are still fresh
from their separate homes, with their separate atmospheres about them.
Some are brisk from the morning's exercise and the cold bath; some are
still a bit sleepy from last night's pleasures; some go to the day's
task with eager anticipation; some move forward indifferent and
resigned. But when these same men and women surge homeward in the
evening, they are one in spirit; they are all equally tired. The city
and the day's task have seized upon them and passed them through the
same set of rollers and pressed out their differences and transformed
them into a single mass of weary human material. The city has had its
day's work out of them and now sends them home to recruit the new
supply of energy that it will demand to-morrow. The unshaven men with
their newspapers and the listless women with their paper-covered novels
show ascetically tight-drawn faces, as if the day had been passed in
prayer and supplication. I need not see those faces; I know they are
there from the steady footfalls on the board platform. I overhear a
young girl recounting what a perfectly lovely time she had last night,
and how she simply couldn't stop dancing; but her foot drags a bit
heavily and there sounds in her chatter and her vehemence the
ground-tone of weariness.

It is not often that I hear the tramp of the late afternoon crowd upon
the wooden platforms at City Hall. I find the sound of the crowd too
solemn to be endured every day, and there is no comfort in the crush. I
usually take pains to travel at an early hour when there are few people,
and one is sure of a seat.

XVI

WHAT WE FORGET

The importance of knowing who my Congressman is had never occurred to me
until Professor Wilson Stubbs brought up the subject at a luncheon in
the Reform Club. Professor Stubbs spoke on Civic Obligations. He argued
that at the bottom of all political corruption lay the average citizen's
personal indifference. "For instance," he said, "how many of those
present know the name of the man who represents their district at
Washingt