its general agent, and I held the position for a year, giving all my spare time to the planning and carrying out of such work. as seemed to me ought to make a record for a reform administration. We wanted it to last. That was a great year. They wanted a positive programme, and my notions of good government were nothing if not positive. They began and ended. with the people's life. We tore down unfit tenements, forced the opening of parks and playgrounds, the establishment of a truant school and the remodeling of the whole school system, the demolition of the overcrowded old Tombs and the erection on its site of a decent new prison. We overhauled the civil courts and made them over new in the charter of the Greater New York. We lighted dark halls; closed the "cruller" bakeries in tenement-house cellars that had caused the loss of no end of lives, for the crullers were boiled in fat in the early morning hours while the tenants slept, and when the fat was spilled in the fire their peril was awful. We fought We fought the cable-car managers at home and the recalcitrant School Commissioners at Albany. We backed up Roosevelt in his fight in the Police Board, and---well, I shall never get time to tell it all. But it was a great year. That it did not keep the Good Government clubs alive was no fault of my programme. It was mine, I guess. I failed to inspire them with the faith that was in me. I had been going it alone so long that I did not know how to use the new tool that had

come to hand. There is nothing like an organization, if you know how to use it. I know how to use it. I did not. Perhaps, also, politics had something to do with it. They were in for playing the game. I never understood it.

But if I did not make the most of it, I had a good time that year. There were first the two small parks to be laid out over on the East Side, where the Gilder Committee had pointed to the smothering crowds. I had myself made a member of the Citizens' Committee that was appointed to locate them. It did not take us any nine years, or six, or three. We

did the business in three weeks, and, having chosen the right spots, we had the Legislature make a law authorizing the city to seize the property at once, ahead of condemnation. We were afraid Tammany might come back, and the

event proved that we were wise. You bring up the people slowly to a reform programme, particularly when it costs money. They will pay for corruption with a growl, but seem to think that virtue ought always to be had for nothing. It makes the politicians' game easy. They steal the money for improvements, and predict that reform will raise the taxrate. When the prophecy comes true, they take the people back in their sheltering embrace with an "I told you so!" and the people nestle there repentant. There was a housing conference at which that part of the work was parceled out: the building of model tenements to the capitalists who formed the City and Suburban Homes Company; the erection of model lodging-houses to D. O. Mills, the banker philanthropist, who was anxious to help that way. I chose for the Good Government clubs the demolition of the old tenements. It was my chance. I hated them. We had had a law passed the year before empowering the Health Board to seize and destroy tenementhouse property that was a threat to the city's health, but it had remained a dead letter. The authorities hesitated to attack property rights, vested rights.

Now that Theodore Roosevelt sat in the Health Board, fresh from his war on the police lodging-rooms of which I told, they hesitated no longer. I put before the Board a list of the sixteen worst rear tenements in the city outside of the Bend, and, while the landlords held their breath in astonishment, they were seized, condemned, and their tenants driven out. The Mott Street Barracks were among them. In 1888 the infant death-rate among the 350 Italians they harbored had been 325 per thousand-that is to say, one-third of all the babies died that year. That was the kind of evidence upon which those rear tenements were arraigned. Ninety-four of them, all told, were seized that year, and in them there had been in four years 956 deaths-a rate of 62.9, when the general c'ty death-rate was 24.63. I shall have once more, and for the last time, to refer to "A Ten Years' War" for the full story of that campaign. As I said, it was great.

Conceive, if you can, the state of mind of a man to whom a dark, overcrowded tenement had ever been as a personal

affront, now suddenly finding himself commissioned with letters of marque and reprisal, as it were, to seize and destroy the enemy wherever found, not one at a time, but by blocks and battalions in the laying out of parks. I fed fat my ancient grudge, and grew good humor enough to last me for a dozen years in those two. They were the years when, in spite of hard work, I began to grow stout, and, honestly, I think it was tearing down tenements that did it. Directly or indirectly, I had a hand in destroying seven whole blocks of them as I count it up. I wish it had been seventy.

The landlords sued, but the courts sided with the Health Board. When at last we stopped to take breath, we had fairly

broken the back of the slum and made precedents of our own that would last a while. Mr. Roosevelt was personally sued twice, I think, but that was all the good it did them. We were having our innings that time, and there were a lot of arrears to collect. The city paid for the property that was taken, of course, and more than it ought to have paid, to my way of thinking. The law gave the owner of a tenement that was altogether unfit just the value of the brick and timbers that were in it. It was enough, for "unfit" meant murderous, and why should a man have a better right to kill his neighbor with a house than with an ax in the street? But the lawyers who counseled compromise bought Gotham Court, one

of the most hopeless slums in the Fourth Ward, for nearly $20,000. It was not worth so many cents. The Barracks with their awful baby death-rate were found to be mortgaged to a cemetery corporation. The Board of Health gave it the price of opening one grave for its share, and tore down the rear tenements. A year or two later I traveled to Europe on an ocean steamer with the treasurer of that graveyard concern. We were ten days on the way, and I am afraid he did not have altogether a good time of it. The ghost of the Barracks would keep rising out of the deep before us, sitting there in our steamer chairs, from whichever quarter the wind blew. I suppose he took it as a victory when the Court of Appeals decided upon a technicality that the Barracks should not have been destroyed; but so did I, for they were down by that time.

I went before the Board of Estimate and Apportionment to oppose an increase in the appropriation for the Tombs which the Commissioner of Correction had asked for. His plea was that there had been a large increase in the census of the prison, and he marched up a column of figures to prove it. To the amazement of the Board, and really, if the truth be told, of myself, I demonstrated clearly from his own figures that not only had there been no increase, but that there could not be without criminally overcrowding the wretched old prison, in which already every cell had two inmates, and some three. The exhibit was so striking that the Commissioner and his bookkeeper retired in confusion. It was just the power of the facts again. I wanted to have the horrid old pile torn down, and had been sitting up nights acquainting myself with all that concerned it. it is gone, and a good riddance to it.

Now

The other computation was vastly more involved. It concerned the schools, about which no one knew anything for certain.

The annual reports of the Department of Education were models of how to say a thing so that no one by any chance could understand what it was about. It was possible to prove from them that, while there was notoriously a dearth of school accommodation, while children knocked vainly for admission and the Superintendent clamored for more schools, yet there were ten or twenty thousand seats to spare. But it was not possible to get the least notion from them of what the real need was. I tried for many months, and then set about finding out for myself how many children who ought to be in school were drifting about the streets. The truant officers, professionally discreet, thought about 800. The Superintendent of Schools guessed at 8,000. The officers of the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, with an eye on the tenements, made it 150,000. I canvassed a couple of wards with the truant officers' reports before me, and upon the basis of what I found there reasoned that there must be about 50,000. They scorned me at the City Hall for it. It was all guesswork, they said, and so it was. We had first to have a school census, and we got one, so that we might know where we were at. But when we had the result of that first census before us, behold! it showed that of 339,756 children of school age in the city 251,235 were accounted for on the roster of public or private schools, 28,452 were employed, and 50,069 on the street or at home. that, if I am not smart at figuring, I may reasonably claim to be a good guesser.

So

The showing that a lack of schools which threw an army of children upon the street went hand in hand with overcrowded jails made us get up and demand that something be done. From the school executive came the helpless suggestion that the thing might be helped by increasing the classes in neighborhoods where there were not enough schools from sixty to seventy-five. Forty or forty-five pupils is held to be the safe limit anywhere. But the time had passed for such pottering. We pulled ourselves together and spent millions in building new schools while "the system" was overhauled; we dragged in a truant school by threatening the city authorities with the power of the State unless they ceased to send truants to

institutions that received child criminals. But a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still; we shall have to do that all over again next. My pet scheme was to have trained oculists attached to the public schools, partly as a means of overcoming stupidity-half of what passes for that in the children is really the teacher's; the little ones are near-sighted; they cannot see the blackboard partly also that they might have an eye on the school buildings and help us get rid of some where they had to burn gas all day. That was upset by the doctors, who were afraid that "private practice would be interfered with." We had n t quite got to the millennium yet. It was so with our bill to establish a farm school to win back young vagrants to a useful life. It was killed at Albany with the challenge that we "had had enough of reform in New York." And so we had, as the events showed. Tammany came back.

But not to stay. We had secured a hold during those three years which I think they little know of. They talk at the Wigwam of the "school vote," and mean the men friends and kin of the

teachers on whom the machine has a grip, or thinks it has; but there is another school vote that is yet to be heard from, when the generation that has had its right to play restored to it comes to the polls. That was the great gain of that time. It was the thing I had in mind back of and beyond all the rest. I was bound to kill the Bend, because it was bad. I wanted the sunlight in there, but so that it might shine on the children at play. That is a child's right, and it is not to be cheated of it. And when it is cheated of it, it is not the child but the community that is robbed of that beside which all its wealth is but tinsel and trash. For men, not money, make a country great, and joyless children do not make good men.

So when the Legislature, urged by the Tenement-House Committee, made it law that no public school should ever again be built in New York without an outdoor playground, it touched the quick. Thereafter it was easy to rescue the small parks from the landscape gardener by laying them under the same rule. It was well we did it, too, for he is a dangerous customer, hard to get around. Twice he has tried to steal one of the little parks we laid out,

the one that is called Seward Park, from the children, and he "points with pride" almost to the playground in the other, which he laid out so badly that it was a failure from the start. However, we shall convert him yet; everything in its season. The Board of Education puzzled over its end of it for a while. The law did not say how big the playground should be, and there was no precedent. No, there was not. I found the key to that puzzle, at least one that fitted, when I was Secretary of the Small Parks Committee. It was my last act as agent of the Good Government clubs to persuade Mayor Strong to appoint that committee. It made short work of its task. We sent for the police to tell us where they had trouble with the boys, and why. It was always the same story: they had no other place to play in than the street, and there they broke windows. So began the trouble. It ended in the police station and the jail. The city was building new schools by the score. We got a list of the sites, and, as we expected, they were where the trouble was worst. Naturally so; that was where the children were. There, then, was our field as a playground committee. Why not kill two birds with one stone, and save money by making them one? By hitching the school and the boys' play together we should speedily get rid of the truant. He was just there as a protest against the school without play.

I asked the Board of Education to make their school playgrounds the neighborhood recreation centers. So they would not need to worry over how big they should be, but just make them as big as they could, whether on the roof or on the ground. They listened, but found difficulties in "the property." Odd, isn't it, this disposition of the world to forever make of the means the end, to glorify the establishment! It was the same story when I asked them to open the schools at night and let in the boys to have their clubs there. The saloon was bidding for them, and bidding high, but the School Board hesitated because a window might be broken or a janitor want extra pay for cleaning up. Before a reluctant consent was given I had to make a kind of promise that I would not appear before the Board again to argue for throwing the doors wider still. But it isn't going to

keep me from putting in the heaviest licks I can, in the campaign that is coming for turning the schools over to the people bodily, and making of them the neighborhood center in all things that make for good, including trades-union meetings and political discussions. Only so shall we make of our schools real cornerstones of our liberties. So, also, we shall through neighborhood pride restore some of the neighborhood feeling, the home feeling that is now lacking in our cities to our grievous loss.

The club prevailed in the end. At least one school let it in, and though the boys did break a window-pane that winter with a ball they paid for it like men, and that ghost was laid. The school playground holds aloof yet from the neighborhood except in the long vacation. But that last is something, and the rest is coming. It could not be coming by any better road than the vacation schools, which are paving the way for common sense everywhere. "Everything takes ten years," said Abram S. Hewitt, when he took his seat as the Chairman of the Small Parks Committee. Ten years before, when he was Mayor, he had put through the law under which the Mulberry Bend had been at last wiped out. We held our meetings at the City Hall, where I had been spurned so often. All things come to those who wait-and fight for them. Yes, fight! I say it advisedly. I have come to the time of life when a man does not lay about him with a club unless he has to. But eternal vigilance is the price of liberty! To be vigilant is to sit up with a club. We, as a people, have provided in the republic a means of fighting for our rights and getting them, and it is our business to do it. We shall never get them in any other way. Colonel Waring was a wise man as well as a great man. His declaration that he cleaned the streets of New York, all prophecies to the contrary notwithstanding, by "putting a man instead of a voter behind every broom," deserves to be put on the monument we shall build by and by to that courageous man, for it is the whole gospel of municipal righteousness in a nutshell. But he never said anything better than when he advised his fellow-citizens to fight, not to plead, for their rights. [TO BE CONTINUED]