"
"Oh, I say, draw it mild. At least exclude the criminal classes," cried
Watts. "They know better."
"We all know better. But we don't live up to our knowledge. I crossed on
one of the big Atlantic liners lately, with five hundred other saloon
passengers. They were naturally people of intelligence, and presumably
of easy circumstances. Yet at least half of those people were plotting
to rob our government of money by contriving plans to avoid paying
duties truly owed. To do this all of them had to break our laws, and in
most cases had, in addition, to lie deliberately. Many of them were
planning to accomplish this theft by the bribery of the custom-house
inspectors, thus not merely making thieves of themselves, but bribing
other men to do wrong. In this city I can show you blocks so densely
inhabited that they are election districts in themselves. Blocks in
which twenty people live and sleep in a single room, year after year;
where the birth of a little life into the world means that all must eat
less and be less warm; where man and woman, old and young, must shiver
in winter, and stifle in summer; where there is not room to bury the
people who live in the block within the ground on which they dwell.
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