ertain whether school funds may
be spent for playgrounds apart from buildings." However, they are going
to provide seventy-five school yards big enough to romp in, and the
other trouble will be got over. In Boston they are planning neighborhood
entertainment as a proper function of the school. Here we shall find for
both school and settlement their proper places with one swoop. The
kindergarten, manual training, and the cooking school, all experiments
in their day, cried out as fads by some, have brought common sense in
their train. When it rules the public school in our cities--I said it
before--we can put off our armor; the battle with the slum will be
over.

[Illustration: Teaching the Girls to Swim: Part of the Public School
Course.]

CHAPTER XVI

REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH

I have sketched in outline the gains achieved in the metropolis since
its conscience awoke. Now, in closing this account, I am reminded of the
story of an old Irishman who died here a couple of years ago. Patrick
Mullen was an honest blacksmith. He made guns for a living. He made them
so well that one with his name on it was worth a good deal more than the
market price of guns. Other makers went to him with offers of money for
the use of his stamp; but they never went twice. When sometimes a gun of
very superior make was brought to him to finish, he would stamp it P.
Mullen, never Patrick Mullen. Only to that which he himself had wrought
did he give his honest name without reserve. When he died, judges and
bishops and other great men crowded to his modest home by the East
River, and wrote letters to the newspapers telling how proud they had
been to call him friend. Yet he was, and remained to the end, plain
Patrick Mullen, blacksmith and gun-maker.

In his life he supplied the answer to the sigh of dreamers in all days:
when will the millennium come? It will come when every man is a Patrick
Mullen at his own trade; not merely a P. Mullen, but a Patrick Mullen.
The millennium of municipal politics, when there shall be no slum to
fight, will come when every citizen does his whole duty as a citizen,
not before. As long as he "despises politics," and deputizes another to
do it for him, whether that other wears the stamp of a Croker or of a
Platt,--it matters little which,--we shall have the slum, and be put
periodically to the trouble and the shame of draining it in the public
sight. A citizen's duty is one thing that cannot be farmed out