pants" at forty cents a dozen
for the making; upon the Potter's Field taking tithe of our city life,
ten per cent each year for the trench, truly the Lost Tenth of the slum.
Our country had grown great and rich; through our ports was poured food
for the millions of Europe. But in the back streets multitudes huddled
in ignorance and want. The foreign oppressor had been vanquished, the
fetters stricken from the black man at home; but his white brother, in
his bitter plight, sent up a cry of distress that had in it a distinct
note of menace. Political freedom we had won; but the problem of
helpless poverty, grown vast with the added offscourings of the Old
World, mocked us, unsolved. Liberty at sixty cents a day set presently
its stamp upon the government of our cities, and it became the scandal
and the peril of our political system.

So the battle began. Three times since the war that absorbed the
nation's energies and attention had the slum confronted us in New York
with its challenge. In the darkest days of the great struggle it was the
treacherous mob;[1] later on, the threat of the cholera, which found
swine foraging in the streets as the only scavengers, and a swarming
host, but little above the hog in its appetites and in the quality of
the shelter afforded it, peopling the back alleys. Still later, the mob,
caught looting the city's treasury with its idol, the thief Tweed, at
its head, drunk with power and plunder, had insolently defied the
outraged community to do its worst. There were meetings and protests.
The rascals were turned out for a season; the arch-chief died in jail. I
see him now, going through the gloomy portals of the Tombs, whither, as
a newspaper reporter, I had gone with him, his stubborn head held high
as ever. I asked myself more than once, at the time when the vile
prison was torn down, whether the comic clamor to have the ugly old
gates preserved and set up in Central Park had anything to do with the
memory of the "martyred" thief, or whether it was in joyful celebration
of the fact that others had escaped. His name is even now one to conjure
with in the Sixth Ward. He never "squealed," and he was "so good to the
poor"--evidence that the slum is not laid by the heels by merely
destroying Five Points and the Mulberry Bend. There are other fights to
be fought in that war, other victories to be won, and it is slow work.
It was nearly ten years after the Great Robbery before decency got a
good upp