"Wait, please," said Luke. "I want to get this thing straight. You say that all your reform movements have had some of this element in them?"
"I say we have always fought the devil with fire."
"And this campaign. You’ve used your fire in it?"
"As little as possible. We never used more than we could help."
"I can’t waste time over such quibbles now," he said. "Jarvie’s arrested and we must get him out and learn the details to prepare our defense."
"Oh, ask them yourself! They have a meeting this afternoon. Of course, they knew! They have been in these fights since long before you were sent to school, and they are not fools."
He walked out of his office, out of the League headquarters and into the street.
§2. His tired brain demanded action. It presented one picture, a canvas as full of figures as a battlefield by Delacroix. There he saw all that he had done or caused to be done: Yeates turned back to the baser cause, Nelson forced to follow, Venable facing financial disaster and soiling his old hands with crime; burglary, prostitution, and fraud stimulated to defeat him; police, city officials, and bankers corrupted to ensnare him; his little fortune, on which hung his mother’s living, imperiled; Betty imperiled, Forbes and the honorable business history of his firm imperiled; the factory’s employees fronting starvation and threatening violence; the elder political parties dragged into a repetition of their former offenses, the reform organization sharing in the evils it sought to reform—these were the present results of his endeavors to civic righteousness. Could mankind be so closely linked? Was there no end to the lives and souls that must be wronged or made wrong by one man trying to do right? He could not contemplate the question.
To escape thought and find action, he went to Brooklyn. He took a taxi to the factory.
The huge brown building rose taciturn before him, ugly, dour. It ran the whole way across the end of the street and was flanked by rows of tumbledown dwellings. One tenuous column of smoke curled from the chimney of its engine-room, but, all about, the streets had an air to which Luke was wholly unaccustomed. The traffic that used to rattle through them had ceased; they seemed at first sight empty; yet at every corner were groups of men and women, idle with that idleness which sits like the outward tokens of a contagious disease upon workers who have ceased their work in anger.