ed by
every authority having jurisdiction, all to no purpose. The stale beer
dives went with them and with the Bend, and the grip of the tramp on our
throat has been loosened. We shall not easily throw it off altogether,
for the tramp has a vote, too, for which Tammany, with admirable
ingenuity, found a new use, when the ante-election inspection of lodging
houses made them less available for colonization purposes than they had
been. Perhaps I should say a new way of very old use. It was simplicity
itself. Instead of keeping tramps in hired lodgings for weeks at a daily
outlay, the new way was to send them all to the island on short
commitments during the canvass, and vote them from there _en bloc_ at
the city's expense.

[Illustration: Mulberry Street Police Station. Waiting for the Lodging
to open.]

Time and education must solve that, like so many other problems which
the slum has thrust upon us. They are the forces upon which, when we
have gone as far as our present supply of steam will carry us, we must
always fall back; and this we may do with confidence so long as we keep
stirring, if it is only marking time, when that is all that can be done.
It is in the retrospect that one sees how far we have come, after all,
and from that gathers courage for the rest of the way. Thirty-two years
have passed since I slept in a police station lodging house, a lonely
lad, and was robbed, beaten, and thrown out for protesting; and when the
vagrant cur that had joined its homelessness to mine, and had sat all
night at the door waiting for me to come out,--it had been clubbed away
the night before,--snarled and showed its teeth at the doorman, raging
and impotent I saw it beaten to death on the step. I little dreamed then
that the friendless beast, dead, should prove the undoing of the
monstrous wrong done by the maintenance of these evil holes to every
helpless man and woman who was without shelter in New York; but it did.
It was after an inspection of the lodging rooms, when I stood with
Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the police board, in the one where
I had slept that night, and told him of it, that he swore they should
go. And go they did, as did so many another abuse in those two years of
honest purpose and effort. I hated them. It may not have been a very
high motive to furnish power for municipal reform; but we had tried
every other way, and none of them worked. Arbitration is good, but there
are times when it becom