“The public authorities and organized charities of Chicago are having more than they can do to care for the tens of thousands of destitute people in the Garden City, and the New York Tribune confesses that the want in that town is as dire as in Chicago. ‘At no moment within the memory of the present generation,’ says the Tribune, ‘has the number of unemployed in this city been so large as just now, and never before has the strain on public and private charity been so severe as during this winter season (1896–97). It is not merely the laboring classes—that is to say, the classes who may be regarded as within facile reach of philanthropic relief—who are the sufferers, but those who may be described as professional men, clerks, the salesmen, the architects and the literary men. Few, save the clergy and physicians, have any idea of the extent to which privation and actual want prevail among these victims of the bad times that are marking the close of the deplorable Democratic administration, and doctor and parson alike wax eloquent about the destitution of the families of those unfortunate men who, while eager for work and ready to do anything for the sake of a living, are for the first time in their lives unable to find employment of any kind.’ After adverting to the sympathy extended to the unfortunate inmates of Sing Sing and other prisons, who are losing their sanity because there is no work to employ them, the Tribune adds: ‘It may be questioned whether the first duty of the people of New York is not toward those of their more honest and honorable fellow-citizens whose enforced idleness, due to their inability to find any employment, is driving them, too, to the verge of insanity—an insanity caused not so much by the brooding over their own unhappy lot as by the spectacle of their wives and little ones literally starving before their eyes. It is not merely on the ground of philanthropy and charity that some means or other should be devised for their relief, but on the score of policy and economy. For the less enforced idleness there is outside the prison the fewer convicts there will be within its walls.’”
The next clipping is as follows:
CHAPTER II.
In November, 1897, when evil forebodings were everywhere hovering about, Mark Mishler, a robust, big-hearted, good-natured lawyer, sat one day in his office at Springfield, Ill. He had just been beaten in a case he had tried before the Supreme Court because the law on which he based the case was declared by the Court to be unconstitutional. He never was mad; his good soul would not let him; but if ever he was perplexed it was now. His mind reverted to the Constitution of the State. He read it over, as he had done many times before, but now he took a special interest in reviewing it. As he read and reread he said to himself: “Thank God! There is one thing bigger than a Court—that is the Constitution, and the people are above that yet. They make the Constitution itself. It ought to have more laws embodied in it, and this one should have been a part of it.”
And as he thought on, his mind reverted to the Constitution of the United States. He turned to it and scanned it over for the first time in many years, perhaps since he was a law student. He had little practice in the United States Courts, and had had no occasion to read it. After he had finished he leaned back in his chair in a meditative mood, saying to himself: “There is the foundation of all our institutions, State and National. That was the beginning. It was the corner-stone of the Republic, and on it all that is good in this country is based.”
He thought on, and added to himself: “And all that is evil, then, must likewise find its basis there.”
The very thought surprised him. In deep meditation, and with strange, unaccountable feelings, he continued until he read the article recognizing human slavery, and declaring the slave trade should not be prohibited before the year 1808. He always knew that, yet he could hardly believe his eyes. He read on till he came to the amendment freeing the slaves, adopted nearly three-quarters of a century afterward.
“Well,” he gasped, almost aloud, “I knew that; I helped pass that very amendment freeing the slaves and, as we were charged at the time, ‘confiscating millions of dollars’ worth of property.’ But lawyer as I am, with twenty-five years of practice, I never thought but Lincoln’s proclamation freed the slaves.”
He dropped back in his chair, lost for half an hour in silent study. As he sat, entirely consumed in his own thought, his very countenance unconsciously brightened. His heart grew light. His eyes beamed within him. He felt a sort of inspiration. A new idea, and a happy one indeed, sprang like an angel of light into his mind.