Our Poorer Brother 239 



at once put them on an intellectual, social, and busi- 

 ness equality with the whites. The effort has failed 

 completely. In large sections of the country the ne- 

 groes are not treated as they should be treated, and 

 politically in particular the frauds upon them have 

 been so gross and shameful as to awaken not merely 

 indignation but bitter wrath ; yet the best friends of 

 the negro admit that his hope lies, not in legislation, 

 but in the constant working of those often unseen 

 forces of the national life which are greater than all 

 legislation. 



It is but rarely that great advances in general 

 social well-being can be made by the adoption of 

 some far-reaching scheme, legislative or otherwise; 

 normally they come only by gradual growth, and by 

 incessant effort to do first one thing, then another, 

 and then another. Quack remedies of the universal 

 cure-all type are generally as noxious to the body 

 politic as to the body corporal. 



Often the head-in-the-air social reformers, be- 

 cause people of sane and wholesome minds will not 

 favor their wild schemes, themselves decline to favor 

 schemes for practical reform. For the last two years 

 there has been an honest effort in New York to give 

 the city good government, and to work intelligently 

 for better social conditions, especially in the poorest 

 quarters. We have cleaned the streets; we have 

 broken the power of the ward boss and the saloon- 

 keeper to work injustice; we have destroyed the 

 most hideous of the tenement houses in which poor 

 people were huddled like swine in a sty; we have 



