he dog-fight outranked the dinner.

This unconquerable vanity, if not turned to use for his good, makes a
tough of the lad with more muscle than brains in a perfectly natural way.
The newspapers tickle it by recording the exploits of his gang with
embellishments that fall in exactly with his tastes. Idleness encourages
it. The home exercises no restraint. Parental authority is lost. At a
certain age young men of all social grades know a heap more than their
fathers, or think they do. The young tough has some apparent reason for
thinking that way. He has likely learned to read. The old man has not; he
probably never learned anything, not even to speak the language that his
son knows without being taught. He thinks him "dead slow," of course, and
lays it to his foreign birth. All foreigners are "slow." The father works
hard. The boy thinks he knows a better plan. The old man has lost his grip
on the lad, if he ever had any. That is the reason why the tough appears
in the second generation and disappears in the third. By that time father
and son are again on equal terms, whatever those terms may be. The
exception to this rule is in the poorest Irish settlements where the
manufacture of the tough goes right on, aided by the "inflooence" of the
police court on one side and the saloon on the other. Between the two the
police fall unwillingly into line. I was in the East Thirty-fifth Street
police station one night when an officer came in with two young toughs
whom he had arrested in a lumber yard where they were smoking and
drinking. They had threatened to kill him and the watchman, and loaded
revolvers were taken from them. In spite of this evidence against them,
the Justice in the police court discharged them on the following morning
with a scowl at the officer, and they were both jeering at him before
noon. Naturally he let them alone after that. It was one case of hundreds
of like character. The politician, of course, is behind them. Toughs have
votes just as they have brickbats and brass-knuckles; when the emergency
requires, an assortment to suit of the one as of the other.

The story of the tough's career I told in "How the Other Half Lives," and
there is no need of repeating it here. Its end is generally lurid, always
dramatic. It is that even when it comes to him "with his boots off," in a
peaceful sick bed. In his bravado one can sometimes catch a glimpse of the
sturdiest traits in the Celtic nature, burlesqued and c