m in school. Officials
who drew big salaries starved the inmates of the almshouse on weak tea
and dry bread, and Bellevue, the poor people's hospital, became a public
scandal. In one night there were five drunken fights, one of them
between two of the attendants who dropped the corpse they were
carrying to the morgue and fought over it. The tenements were plunged
back into the foulness of their worst day; the inspectors were
answerable, not to the Health Board, but to the district leader, and the
landlord who stood well with him thumbed his nose at them and at their
orders to clean up. The neighborhood parks, acquired at such heavy
sacrifice, lay waste. Tammany took no step toward improving them. One it
did take up at Fort George; and though the property only cost the city
$600,000, the bills for taking it were $127,467. That is the true
Tammany style. In the Seward Park, where the need of relief was
greatest, Tammany election district captains built booths, rent free,
for the sale of dry goods and fish. That was "their share." Wealthy
corporations were made to pay heavily for "peace"; timid storekeepers
were blackmailed. One, a Jew, told his story: he was ordered to pay five
dollars a week for privilege of keeping open Sundays. He paid, and they
asked ten. When he refused, he was told that it would be the worse for
him. He closed up. The very next week he was sued for a hundred dollars
by a man of whom he had never borrowed anything. He did not defend the
suit, and it went against him. In three days the sheriff was in his
store. He knew the hopelessness of it then, and went out and mortgaged
his store and paid the bill. The next week another man sued him for a
hundred dollars he did not owe. He went and threw himself on his mercy,
and the man let him off for the costs.

He was one of the many thousands of toilers who look with fear to the
approaching summer because it is then the hot tenement kills their
babies. Their one chance of life then depends upon the supply of ice
that is hawked from door to door in small pieces, since tenements have
rarely other refrigerator than the draughty air-shaft. The greed of
politicians plotted to deprive them of even this chance. They had
control of docks and means of transportation and they cornered the
supply, raising the price from thirty to sixty cents a hundred pounds
and suppressing the five-cent piece. Some of them that sat in high
official station grew rich, but the poor man's