nd they were on
the Park Department's domain, where no Colonel Waring was in control.
But while their owners were triumphing, the children playing among the
trucks set one of them rolling down into a cellar, and three or four of
the little ones were crushed. That was the end. The trucks disappeared.
Even Tammany has not ventured to put them back, so great was the relief
of their going. They were not only a hindrance to the sweeper and the
skulking-places of all manner of mischief at night, but I have
repeatedly seen the firemen baffled in their efforts to reach a burning
house, where they stood four and six deep in the wide "slips" at the
river.

Colonel Waring did more for the cause of labor than all the walking
delegates of the town together, by investing a despised but highly
important task with a dignity which won the hearty plaudits of a
grateful city. When he uniformed his men and announced that he was going
to parade with them so that we might all see what they were like, the
town laughed and poked fun at the "white wings"; but no one went to see
them who did not come away converted to an enthusiastic belief in the
man and his work. Public sentiment, that had been half reluctantly
suspending judgment, expecting every day to see the colonel "knuckle
down to politics" like his predecessors, turned in an hour, and after
that there was little trouble. The tenement house children organized
street cleaning bands to help along the work, and Colonel Waring
enlisted them as regular auxiliaries and made them useful.

They had no better friend. When the unhappy plight of the persecuted
push-cart men--all immigrant Jews, who were blackmailed, robbed, and
driven from pillar to post as a nuisance after they had bought a license
to trade in the street--appealed vainly for a remedy. Colonel Waring
found a way out in a great morning market in Hester Street that should
be turned over to the children for a playground in the afternoon. But
though he proved that it would pay interest on the investment in market
fees, and many times in the children's happiness, it was never built. It
would have been a most fitting monument to the man's memory. His broom
saved more lives in the crowded tenements than a squad of doctors. It
did more: it swept the cobwebs out of our civic brain and conscience,
and set up a standard of a citizen's duty which, however we may for the
moment forget, will be ours until we have dragged other things than our