but it left the trucks and the
ash barrels to Colonel Waring as hopeless. Trucks have votes; at least
their drivers have. Now that they are gone, the drivers would be the
last to bring them back; for they have children, too, and the rescued
streets gave them their first playground. Perilous, begrudged by
policeman and storekeeper, though it was, it was still a playground.

[Illustration: It costs a Dollar a Month to sleep in these Sheds.]

But one is coming in which the boy shall rule unchallenged. The Mulberry
Bend Park kept its promise. Before the sod was laid in it two more were
under way in the thickest of the tenement house crowding, and though the
landscape gardener has tried twice to steal them, he will not succeed.
Play piers and play schools are the order of the day. We shall yet
settle the "causes that operated sociologically" on the boy with a
lawn-mower and a sand heap. You have got your boy, and the heredity of
the next one, when you can order his setting.

Social halls for the older people's play are coming where the saloon has
had a monopoly of the cheer too long. The labor unions and the reformers
work together to put an end to sweating and child-labor. The gospel of
less law and more enforcement acquired standing while Theodore Roosevelt
sat in the governor's chair rehearsing to us Jefferson's forgotten
lesson that "the whole art and science of government consists in being
honest." With a back door to every ordinance that touched the lives of
the people, if indeed the whole thing was not the subject of open
ridicule or the vehicle of official blackmail, it seemed as if we had
provided a perfect municipal machinery for bringing the law into
contempt with the young, and so for wrecking citizenship by the shortest
cut.

Of free soup there is an end. It was never food for free men. The last
spoonful was ladled out by yellow journalism with the certificate of the
men who fought Roosevelt and reform in the police board that it was
good. It is not likely that it will ever plague us again. Our experience
has taught us a new reading of the old word that charity covers a
multitude of sins. It does. Uncovering some of them has kept us busy
since our conscience awoke, and there are more left. The worst of them
all, that awful parody on municipal charity, the police station lodging
room, is gone, after twenty years of persistent attack upon the foul
dens,--years during which they were arraigned, condemned, indict