d. As to the brutality, they knew that fifty young men are
maimed or killed at football to one who fares ill in a boxing match.
Would it seem to them common sense, or cant and humbug?

That is what it comes down to in the end: common sense and common
honesty. Common sense to steer us clear of the "sociology" reef that
would make our cause ridiculous, on Fifth Avenue and in East Broadway. I
have no quarrel with the man who would do things by system and in order;
but the man who would reduce men and women and children to mere items in
his infallible system and classify and sub-classify them until they are
as dried up as his theories, that man I will fight till I die. One throb
of a human heart is worth a whole book of his stuff. Common honesty to
keep us afloat at all. If we worship as success mere money-getting,
closing our eyes to the means, let us at least say it like the man who
told me to-day that "after all, one has to admire Bill Devery; he's got
the dough," Devery was Tammany's police chief. The man is entitled to
his opinion, but if it gets hitched to the reform cart by mistake, the
load is going to be spilled. It has been, more than once.

A saving sense of humor might have avoided some of those pitfalls. I am
seriously of the opinion that a professional humorist ought to be
attached to every reform movement, to keep it from making itself
ridiculous by either too great solemnity or too much conceit. As it is,
the enemy sometimes employs him with effect. Failing the adoption of
that plan, I would recommend a decree of banishment against
photographers, press-clippings men, and the rest of the congratulatory
staff. Why should the fact that a citizen has done a citizen's duty
deserve to be celebrated in print and picture, as if something
extraordinary had happened? The smoke of battle had not cleared away
after the victory of reform in the fall of 1894, before the citizens'
committee and all the little sub-committees rushed pell-mell to the
photographer's to get themselves on record as the men who did it. The
spectacle might have inspired in the humorist the advice to get two sets
made, while they were about it, one to serve by and by as an exhibit of
the men who didn't; and, as the event proved, he would have been right.

But it is easy to find fault, and on that tack we get no farther. Those
men did a great work, and they did it well. They built from the bottom
and they built the foundation broad and strong. Good