I went on duty at eight, and the immediate result was to
compel all the others to do the same. This was a sore grievance,
and was held against me for a long time. The logical outcome of
the war it provoked was to stretch the day farther into the small
hours. Before I left Mulberry Street the circuit had been made.
The watch now is kept up through the twenty-four hours without
interruption. Like its neighbor the Bowery, Mulberry Street never
sleeps.
[Illustration: General Ely Parker, Chief of the Six Nations.]
There had been in 1879 an awakening of the public conscience on
the tenement-house question which I had followed with interest,
because it had started in the churches that have always seemed to
me to be the right forum for such a discussion, on every ground,
and most for their own sake and the cause they stand for. But
the awakening proved more of a sleepy yawn than real--like a man
stretching himself in bed with half a mind to get up. Five years
later, in 1884, came the Tenement-House Commission which first
brought home to us the fact that the people living in the tenements
were "better than the houses.
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