Coming from Europe, as we had done, between two Wednesdays, without passing through New York City, our first impressions of a wildly enthusiastic patriotism, as manifested by the advertising class, were gained in Chicago, and were especially striking by contrast with the quiet of the lands we so recently had left. We had been studying social questions in Germany, Holland and England during the past year, and were therefore more observant of varied expressions and contrasts in social life.
In the evening we strolled on the streets in company of a friend from New Orleans, who was the first to greet us on arrival, to see the wonderful window illuminations and color displays that made the pavements at night brighter than day. Crowds of men, women and children, representing every stratum of society, promenaded past these shows or lingered before them. Behind great panes of plate glass were groups of ghastly wax figures representing naval engagements or camps of starving Cuban reconcentrados. The favorite mottoes displayed were "Suffering Cuba Must Be Free," and "Remember the Maine." In drinking places there was added to the last motto, "Down with Spain."
The show windows were continuous for many blocks and each shopman tried to eclipse the displays of his neighbors by the novelty, brilliancy or sensationalism of his own. Every known electrical device was used in the effects and nothing that we had ever seen abroad—in the Orient or in Europe—approached the wonder of these advertising conceits. They were more marvelous than anything Madame Toussaud ever designed. They formed a veritable Patrio-Commercial-Midway-Plaisance and continued to attract a street-full of people until long after midnight. Our New Orleans friend declared that "they had done more to excite popular sympathy for the Cuban cause than the jaundiced newspapers themselves."
At several points we met companies of Salvation Army men and women on street duty. The old army under the command of General Booth and the new American division under the Ballington-Booths were both in the field. They were waging quite a different kind of warfare, but with an enthusiasm not to be outdone by the newer cause. With drum, tambourines, singing and prayers they tried to draw an audience from the stream of the promenade to listen to appeals in behalf of starving women and children reconcentradoed in alleys, areas and cellars within a quarter of a mile of the scene of all this patriotic extravagance. The appeals of the Salvation soldiers were earnest and pathetic, but their cause was no novelty and had lost its effect by a monotony of iteration and reiteration, and the victims of abuse and neglect that the army sought to rescue were too near to the feet of the crowd to be seen and pitied. A few small coins, principally from visiting countrymen, were collected, but scarcely enough, it seemed, to support the commissariat of the army itself. The protests of the speakers corroborated this seeming. Here were exhibited, side by side, expressions of far-away charity and near-to neglect of it; an incomprehensible inconsistency; a contrast, indeed!
But this is not the contrast royal of our story, which furnishes us with our text. We were yet to witness an evidence of barbaric neglect such as the bull ring does not engender and that even the cruelty of the Dark Ages did not equal.
Our party had drifted with the crowd until nearly midnight, when we turned toward Michigan Boulevard and the lake for quiet and fresh air. We were full of the idea that Cuba would be made free, and proud of America for realizing her destiny of being the pioneer in the vanguard of progress toward universal freedom; but we were soon to be called back to facts, and home realities, by a revelation of cruelest neglect that must continue to haunt us until the possibility of such neglect has ceased to exist. Under the shadow of the portal of the Pullman Building, which serves as general offices of the Pullman's Palace Car Company, we met an adventure that showed an appalling contrast to the patriotic enthusiasm that blared in the thoroughfares we had just quitted. We were arrested by the plaintive voice of a child in the toils of a six-foot policeman.
"Please, mister," wailed the child, "lemme go. I didn't swipe none ov dem cakes; 'twas me brudder and de odder kids dat swiped 'em; I ain't done nothin', and I won't do nothin' no more if you'll only let me slide; I won't never come out annudder night—honest I won't—if you'll let me go. Me brudder an' de udder kids'll go home widout me an' I don't know de way. Please, mister cop, lemme go; please! please!!—"
The child could not have been more than four years of age, but his small vocabulary was as full of the slang of the slums as it was deficient in the terms of childhood and innocence. The policeman was kindly disposed, but felt compelled to administer some sort of correction, and this is how he did it: His reproof was well meant, but oh! how evil was it in its suggestions to a soul just receiving its first impressions of life, and of the world, out of which to build a character.