But if God punished the new Nineveh, it paid him little heed, for a revel of crime ensued; burglaries were countless. Vice ruled and people danced and drank with desperate zeal.
More amazing yet, a fever of prosperity followed. When lots in the burned district were offered at auction, the first of them brought prices above anybody’s dreams. A panic of enthusiasm made skyrockets of values. People who had a little cash laid it down as a first payment on property far beyond their means, and then borrowed money to build with. New shops and tenements began to shoot up, and of a statelier sort than before. Brick and marble replaced wood, and the builders were so active that the editor of the Mirror was reminded of his classics and quoted the scene in Vergil where Æneas watched the masons and architects of Tyre raising Carthage to glory.
It was ominous, however, that most of these buildings were founded upon mortgages. There was frenzy, not sanity, in the land speculation. Wildcat banks were opened everywhere. Prices for all things soared till flour reached fifteen dollars a barrel and wheat two dollars a bushel. The poor grew restive. Everybody grew restive.
War broke out against the Catholics. In the Protestant pulpits they were assailed as worse than atheists. The monasteries and nunneries were described as dens of vice, and the populace was finally so aroused that a Protestant mob attacked Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and would have set it afire if it had not been turned into a fortress of armed men with rifles aimed through walls crenelated for defense. There was a riot also in a theatre.
New York was all riot. Mobs gathered at every pretext, and nothing would stop them but bullets or the threat of them. The only subject on which there was even partial agreement was water. The one insurance policy that could be trusted was offered by the Croton Company. The aqueduct would cost only four and a half millions. They said “only” now, for the fire had burned up seventeen millions in a night or two.
In April the engineers went out upon the mellowing hills and began to pound stakes again, to re-survey and to wrangle with the landholders.
The people of Tarrytown and the other communities met to protest that the taking of their land was unconstitutional, but nothing could check the city’s ruthlessness. The Water Commissioners, unable to buy, were authorized to condemn and to take over at their own appraisement. But the landholders made a hard fight, and some of them brought their claims to RoBards’ office. They found in him a ready warrior, for he understood the spirit that actuated them.
Lawyer though he was, RoBards could never keep his own heart out of his cases. If he had been a surgeon he would have suffered every pang that his patients endured; he would have gone frantic with rage against the mysteries of anguish, the incomprehensible, immemorial torture-festival that life has been. He would either have howled blasphemies at his God for his inhumanity, or he would have taken refuge in atheism from the horror of blaming a deity for infinite cruelties, the least of which, if inflicted by a man upon an animal, would have caused his fellowmen to destroy him as a hydrophobic wolf.
The law was a like insanity to RoBards. Since it is a condition of human nature that almost every man sees a sacredness in his own rights and a wickedness in every claim that conflicts with his own happiness; and since such rights and wrongs crisscross inextricably and are intertangled in such a Gordian knot as only a sword can solve, it is inevitable that cheap or bitter humorists should continue to find material for easy satire or fierce invective in the lawyers and judges who endeavor to reach peace by compromise.
Lawyers can prosper only as doctors do, by stifling their passions and devoting their intellects to their professions as a kind of noble sport. But RoBards was not a sportsman.