n, a "job on the streets,"--that is, in the Street
Cleaning Department,--and asks no other return than that he shall vote
as directed? Vote! Not only he, but his cousins and brothers and uncles
will vote as they are told, to get Pietro the job he covets. If it
pleases the other man, what is it to him for whom he votes? He is after
the job.

Here, ready-made to the hand of the politician, is such material as he
never saw before. For Pietro's loyalty is great. As a police detective,
one of his own people, once put it to me, "He got a kind of an idea, or
an old rule: an eye for an eye; do to another as you'd be done by; if he
don't squeal on you, you stick by him, no matter what the consequences."
This "kind of an idea" is all he has to draw upon for an answer to the
question if the thing is right. But the question does not arise. Why
should it? Was he not told by the agitators whom the police jailed at
home that in a republic all men are made happy by means of the vote? And
is there not proof of it? It has made him happy, has it not? And the man
who bought his vote seems to like it. Well, then?

[Illustration: The Play School. Dressing Dolls for a Lesson.]

Very early Pietro discovered that it was every man for himself, in the
chase of the happiness which this powerful vote had in keeping. He was
robbed by the padrone--that is, the boss--when he came over, fleeced on
his steamship fare, made to pay for getting a job, and charged three
prices for board and lodging and extras while working in the railroad
gang. The boss had a monopoly, and Pietro was told that it was
maintained by his "divvying" with some railroad official. Rumor said, a
very high-up official, and that the railroad was in politics in the
city; that is to say, dealt in votes. When the job gave out, the boss
packed him into the tenement he had bought with his profits on the
contract; and if Pietro had a family, told him to take in lodgers and
crowd his flat, as the Elizabeth Street tenements were crowded, so as to
make out the rent, and to never mind the law. The padrone was a
politician, and had a pull. He was bigger than the law, and it was the
votes he traded in that did it all. Now it was Pietro's turn. With his
vote he could buy what to him seemed wealth; two dollars a day. In the
muddle of ideas, that was the one which stood out clearly. When citizen
papers were offered him for $12.50, he bought them quickly, and got his
job on the street.

It was t