The Tammany officials at the City Hall told us insolently
to go ahead and build lodging-houses ourselves; they had other
things to use the city's money for than to care for the homeless
poor; which, indeed, was true. The Charity Organization Society
that stood for all the rest gave up in discouragement and announced
its intention to start a Wayfarer's Lodge itself, on the Boston
plan, and did so. "You see," was the good-by with which my colaborers
left me, "we will never succeed." My campaign had collapsed.
But even then we were winning. Never was defeat in all that time
that did not in the end turn out a step toward victory. This much
the unceasing agitation had effected, though its humane purpose
made no impression on the officials, that the accommodation for
lodgers in the station-houses was sensibly shrunk. Where there had
been forty that took them in, there were barely two dozen left. The
demand for separate women's prisons with police matrons in charge,
which was one of the phases the new demand for decency was assuming,
bred a scarcity of house-room, and one by one the foul old dens
were closed and not reopened.
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