The health inspectors' report
clinched the matter. The newspapers editorially abandoned their
reporters to ridicule and their fate. The city had to purchase a
strip of land along the streams wide enough to guard against direct
pollution. It cost millions of dollars, but it was the merest
trifle to what a cholera epidemic would have meant to New York in
loss of commercial prestige, let alone human lives. The contention
over that end of it was transferred to Albany, where the politicians
took a hand. What is there they do not exploit? Years after, meeting
one of them who knew my share in it, he asked me, with a wink and
a confidential shove, "how much I got out of it." When I told him
"nothing," I knew that upon my own statement he took me for either
a liar or a fool, the last being considerably the worse of the two
alternatives.
In all of this battlesome account I have said nothing about the
biggest fight of all. I had that with myself. In the years that
had passed I had never forgotten the sergeant in the Church Street
police station, and my dog.
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