er grip. That was when the civic conscience awoke in 1879.

[Footnote 1: The draft riots of 1863.]

And after all that, the Lexow disclosures of inconceivable rottenness of
a Tammany police; the woe unto you! of Christian priests calling vainly
upon the chief of the city "to save its children from a living hell,"
and the contemptuous reply on the witness-stand of the head of the party
of organized robbery, at the door of which it was all laid, that he was
"in politics, working for his own pocket all the time, same as you and
everybody else!"

Slow work, yes! but be it ever so slow, the battle has got to be fought,
and fought out. For it is one thing or the other: either we wipe out the
slum, or it wipes out us. Let there be no mistake about this. It cannot
be shirked. Shirking means surrender, and surrender means the end of
government by the people.

If any one believes this to be needless alarm, let him think a moment.
Government by the people must ever rest upon the people's ability to
govern themselves, upon their intelligence and public spirit. The slum
stands for ignorance, want, unfitness, for mob-rule in the day of wrath.
This at one end. At the other, hard-heartedness, indifference,
self-seeking, greed. It is human nature. We are brothers whether we own
it or not, and when the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we
shall look vainly for the virtue of good citizenship on Fifth Avenue.
When the slum flourishes unchallenged in the cities, their wharves may,
indeed, be busy, their treasure-houses filled,--wealth and want go so
together,--but patriotism among their people is dead.

As long ago as the very beginning of our republic, its founders saw that
the cities were danger-spots in their plan. In them was the peril of
democratic government. At that time, scarce one in twenty-five of the
people in the United States lived in a city. Now it is one in three. And
to the selfishness of the trader has been added the threat of the slum.
Ask yourself then how long before it would make an end of us, if let
alone.

Put it this way: you cannot let men live like pigs when you need their
votes as freemen; it is not safe.[2] You cannot rob a child of its
childhood, of its home, its play, its freedom from toil and care, and
expect to appeal to the grown-up voter's manhood. The children are our
to-morrow, and as we mould them to-day so will they deal with us then.
Therefore that is not safe. Unsafest of all is any t