They also make for disease. ... From the tenements there comes a
stream of sick, helpless people to our hospitals and dispensaries...
from them also comes a host of paupers and charity seekers. Most
terrible of all... the fact that, mingled with the drunken, the
dissolute, the improvident, the diseased, dwell the great mass of
the respectable workingmen of the city with their families."
This after all the work of twenty years! Yet the work was not wasted,
for at last we see the truth. Seeing, it is impossible that the
monstrous wrong should go unrighted and government of the people
endure, as endure it will, I know. We have only begun to find out
what it can do for mankind in the day when we shall all think enough
about the common good, the _res publica_, to forget about ourselves.
In that day, too, the boss shall have ceased from troubling. However
gross he wax in our sight, he has no real substance. He is but an
ugly dream of political distemper. Sometimes when I hear him spoken
of with bated breath, I think of the Irish teamster who went to
the priest in a fright; he had seen a ghost on the church wall as
he passed it in the night.
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