It is just
a question of endurance. If you keep it up, they can't.
They began to give, those grim walls, when typhus fever broke out
in the city in the winter of 1891-92. The wonder was that it did
not immediately centre in the police lodging-rooms. There they lay,
young and old, hardened tramps and young castaways with minds and
souls soft as wax for their foulness to be stamped upon[Footnote:
The old cry of sensation mongering was raised more than once when
I was making my charges. People do not like to have their rest
disturbed. Particularly did the critics object to the statement
that there were young people in the dens; they were all old tramps,
they said. For an answer I went in and photographed the boys and
girls one night, and held their pictures up before the community.
In the Oak Street Station alone, one of the vilest, there were six
as likely young fellows as I ever saw, herded with forty tramps
and thieves. Not one of them would come out unscathed.], on bare
floors of stone or planks.
[Illustration: The Lodging-room at the Leonard Street Police Station.
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