Three years later the Reinhardt Committee reported to the Legislature
that the net result of the Factory Law was a mass of perjury and
child-labor, and day began to dawn for the little ones, too.
Rough ways and rough work? Yes, but you must use the tools that
come to hand, and be glad for them, if you want to get things done.
Bludgeons were needed just then, and, after all, you can get a good
deal of fun out of one when it is needed. I know I did. By that
time the whole battle with the slum had evolved itself out of
the effort to clean one pig-sty, and, as for my own share in it,
to settle for one dead dog. It was raging all along the line with
demands for tenement-house reform and the destruction of the old
rookeries; for parks for the people who were penned up in the slum;
for playgrounds for their children; for decent teaching and decent
schools. There were too many dark spots in New York where we had
neither. So dense was the ignorance of the ruling powers of the
needs and real condition of the public schools, which, on parade
days, they spoke of sententiously as the "corner-stone of our
liberties," while the people cheered the sentiment, that it was
related how a Tammany Mayor had appointed to the office of school
trustee in the Third Ward a man who had been dead a whole year,
and how, when the world marvelled, it had been laughed off at the
City Hall with the comment that what did it matter: there were no
schools in the ward; it was the wholesale grocery district.
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