koned with Colonel Waring, however. When they had had their say, the
colonel arose, and, curtly reminding them that they had really had no
hand in the business, proposed three cheers for the citizen effort that
had struck the slum this staggering blow. There was rather a feeble
response on the platform, but rousing cheers from the crowd, with whom
the colonel was a prime favorite, and no wonder. Two years later he laid
down his life in the fight which he so valiantly and successfully waged.
It is the simple truth that he was killed by politics. The services
which he had rendered the city would have entitled him in any reputable
business to be retained in the employment that was his life and his
pride. Had he been so retained, he would not have gone to Cuba, and
would in all human probability be now alive. But Tammany is not "in
politics for its health" and had no use for him, though no more grievous
charge could be laid at his door, even in the heat of the campaign, than
that he was a "foreigner," being from Rhode Island. Spoils politics
never craved a heavier sacrifice of any community.

[Illustration: Colonel George E. Waring, Jr.]

It was Colonel Waring's broom that first let light into the slum. That
which had come to be considered an impossible task he did by the simple
formula of "putting a man instead of a voter behind every broom." The
words are his own. The man, from a political dummy who loathed his job
and himself in it with cause, became a self-respecting citizen, and the
streets that had been dirty were swept. The ash barrels which had
befouled the sidewalks disappeared, almost without any one knowing it
till they were gone. The trucks that obstructed the children's only
playground, the street, went with the dirt, despite the opposition of
the truckman who had traded off his vote to Tammany in the past for
stall room at the curbstone. They did not go without a struggle. When
appeal to the alderman proved useless, the truckman resorted to
strategy. He took a wheel off, or kept a perishing nag, that could not
walk, hitched to the truck over night to make it appear that it was
there for business. But subterfuge availed as little as resistance. In
the Mulberry Bend he made his last stand. The old houses had been torn
down, leaving a three-acre lot full of dirt mounds and cellar holes.
Into this the truckmen of the Sixth Ward hauled their carts, and defied
the street cleaners. They were no longer in their way, a