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Riis, Jacob A., 1849-1914

"The Making of an American"

Maybe the fashion in wolves has changed since. But, anyway,
a drawing would not have been evidence of the kind I wanted. We used
to go in the small hours of the morning into the worst tenements to
count noses and see if the law against overcrowding was violated,
and the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I
must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something. "A
man may be a man even in a palace" in modern New York as in ancient
Rome, but not in a slum tenement. So it seemed to me, and in anger
I looked around for something to strike off his fetters with. But
there was nothing.
I wrote, but it seemed to make no impression. One morning, scanning
my newspaper at the breakfast table, I put it down with an outcry
that startled my wife, sitting opposite. There it was, the thing
I had been looking for all those years. A four-line despatch from
somewhere in Germany, if I remember right, had it all. A way had
been discovered, it ran, to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest
corner might be photographed that way. I went to the office full
of the idea, and lost no time in looking up Dr.


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