There is a protest, an outcry, but it is related neither to the church nor to the synagogue.  The East Side has a soul, but it is not an ecclesiastical soul!  It is a soul that is alive—­so much alive to the interest of the people that many times I felt ashamed of myself when I listened to the socialistic orators on the street corners and in the East Side halls.  They were stirring up the minds of the people.  They were not merely making them discontented with conditions, but they were offering a programme of reconstruction—­a programme that included a trowel as well as a sword.

The soul of the East Side expressed itself in the Yiddish press, daily, weekly, and monthly, and in Yiddish literature, and in the spoken word of the propagandist whose ideal, though limited in literary expression, made him a flame of living fire.  It was this soul of the East Side that drove me against my will to study the relation of politics to the condition of the people.  One of the first things that I discovered was the grip that Tammany had on the people.  Every saloon keeper was a power in the community.  Men, of any force of character whatever, who were willing to hold their hands behind their backs for Tammany graft, were singled out by the organization for some moiety of honour.  Small merchants found it to their advantage to keep on the right side of the saloon keepers and the Tammany leaders.  I remember trying to express this thought in an uptown church to a wealthy congregation; and I remember distinctly, also, that I was rebuked by one of the leading lights of the missionary society of which I was a part.  I was informed that my business was to “save souls,” and in my public addresses to tell how I saved them; that political conditions must be left to the politicians—­and it was done.

To the old church at the corner of Market and Henry streets came Dowling.  He followed me as a matter of fellowship—­we loved each other.  And came also Dave Ranney, the “puddler from Pittsburg.”

On the first anniversary of Dave’s conversion, I gathered a hundred wastrels of the Bowery together and gave them a dinner at the church.  Dave, of course, was the guest of honour.  When my guests were full and warm, they became reminiscent, and I urged them, a few of them, to tell us their stories—­to unfold the torn manuscripts of their lives.  Dave told his first.

“Boys,” he said, “I was one of de toughest gazabos what ever hung aroun’ de square.  I met dis man an’ tried t’ bleed ’im, but it warn’t no go—­’e was on to de game and cudn’t be touch’t.

“I giv’d ‘im a song an’ dance story fur weeks.  One day ’e sez to me, sez ’e, ‘Chum!’—­well, say boys, when I went out an’ had a luk at meself, sez I, ‘Ye dhirty loafer, if a man like dat calls y’ “chum,” why don’t y’ take a brace an’ get on de dead level?’ So I did an’ I’ve been on de dead level ever since—­ain’t I, boss?”