safely;
and the slum is not limited by the rookeries of Mulberry or Ludlow
streets. It has long roots that feed on the selfishness and dulness of
Fifth Avenue quite as greedily as on the squalor of the Sixth Ward. The
two are not nearly so far apart as they look.

[Illustration: Athletic Meets in Crotona Park.]

I am not saying this because it is anything new, but because we have
had, within the memory of us all, an illustration of its truth in
municipal politics. Waring and Roosevelt were the Patrick Mullens of the
reform administration which Tammany replaced with her insolent platform,
"To hell with reform!" It was not an ideal administration, but it can be
said of it, at least, that it was up to the times it served. It made
compromises with spoils politics, and they were wretched failures. It
took Waring and Roosevelt on the other plan, on which they insisted, of
divorcing politics from the public business, and they let in more light
than even my small parks over on the East Side. For they showed us where
we stood and what was the matter with us. We believed in Waring when he
demonstrated the success of his plan for cleaning the streets; not
before. When Roosevelt announced his programme, of enforcing the excise
law because it _was_ law, a howl arose that would have frightened a less
resolute man from his purpose. But he went right on doing the duty he
was sworn to do. And when, at the end of three months of clamor and
abuse, we saw the spectacle of the saloon keepers formally resolving to
help the police instead of hindering them; of the prison ward in
Bellevue Hospital standing empty for three days at a time, an
astonishing and unprecedented thing, which the warden could only
attribute to the "prompt closing of the saloon at one A.M."; and of the
police force recovering its lost self-respect,--we had found out more
and greater things than whether the excise law was a good or a bad law.
We understood what Roosevelt meant when he insisted upon the "primary
virtues" of honesty and courage in the conduct of public business. For
the want of them in us, half the laws that touched our daily lives had
became dead letters or vehicles of blackmail and oppression. It was
worth something to have that lesson taught us in that way; to find out
that simple, straightforward, honest dealing as between man and man is
after all effective in politics as in gun-making. Perhaps we have not
mastered the lesson yet. But we have not disch