Finding Cleveland hopeless for me, I one day picked up and left. Then came Buffalo¹, which I reached toward the end of March. Aside from the Falls I found it a little tame, no especial snap to it—not as much as I had felt to be characteristic of Cleveland. What interest there was for me I provided myself, wandering about in odd drear neighborhoods, about grain elevators and soap factories and railroad yards and manufacturing districts. Here, as in Cleveland, I could not help but see that in spite of our boasted democracy and equality of opportunity there was as much misery² and squalor and as little decent balancing of opportunity against energy as anywhere else in the world. The little homes, the poor, shabby, colorless, drear, drab little homes with their grassless “yards,” their unpaved streets, their uncollected garbage, their fluttering, thin-flamed gas-lamps, the crowds of ragged³, dirty, ill-cared-for children! Near at hand was always the inevitable⁴ and wretched saloon, not satisfying a need for pleasure in a decent way but pandering⁵ to the lowest and most conniving⁶ and most destroying instincts of the lowest politicians and heelers and grafters and crooks⁷, while the huge financial and manufacturing magnates at the top with their lust⁸ for power and authority used the very flesh of the weaker elements for purposes of their own. It was the saloon, not liquor, which brought about the prohibition⁹ folly¹⁰. I used to listen, as a part of my reportorial duties, to the blatherings of thin-minded, thin-blooded, thin-experienced religionists as well as to those of kept editorial writers, about the merits and

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