Go and look at it to-day and see what it
is like.
But that is another story. The other nuisance came first. The first
guns that I have any record of were fired in my newspapers in 1883,
and from that time till Theodore Roosevelt shut up the vile dens
in 1895 the battle raged without intermission. The guns I speak
of were not the first that were fired--they were the first I fired
so far as I can find. For quite a generation before that there had
been protests and complaints from the police surgeons, the policemen
themselves who hated to lodge under one roof with tramps, from
citizen bodies that saw in the system an outrage upon Christian
charity and all decency, but all without producing any other effect
than spasmodic whitewashing and the ineffectual turning on of the
hose. Nothing short of boiling water would have cleansed those dens.
Nothing else came of it, because stronger even than the selfish
motive that exploits public office for private gain is the deadly
inertia in civic life which simply means that we are all as lazy as
things will let us be.
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