It was my opinion then that the largest fortunes were yet to be made in the South, because there was more room to make them there.  During my two weeks in the South, at that time, mingling with all classes of people, I never heard an unkind word against the North, and that only a little over ten years since the close of the war.  Congressional politicians were still enlarging upon the belligerency of the South, but they had personal designs at President making.  There was no more use for Federal military in New Orleans than there was need of them in Brooklyn.  I was the guest in New Orleans of the Hon. E.J.  Ellis, many years in Congress, and I had a taste of real Southern hospitality.  It was everywhere.  The spirit of fraternity was in the South long before it reached the North.  Up to this time I had echoed Horace Greeley’s advice, “Go West.”  For years afterwards I changed it.  In my advice to young men I said to all, “Go South.”

In the spring of 1878, however, things in Brooklyn began to look more promising for young men and young women.  I remember after closely examining Mayor Howell’s report and the Police Commissioner’s report I was much pleased.  Mayor Howell was one of the most courteous and genial men I ever knew, and Superintendent Campbell was a good police officer.  These two men, by their individual interest in Brooklyn reforms, had gained the confidence of our tax-payers and our philanthropists.  The police force was too small for a city of 5,000,000 people.  The taxes were not big enough to afford an adequate equipment.  There was a constant depreciation of our police and excise officials in the churches.  City officials should not be caricatured—­they should be respected, or dismissed.  It was about this time a mounted police department was started in Brooklyn, and though small it was needed.  What the miscreant community of Brooklyn most needed at this time was not sermons or lessons in the common schools, but a police club—­and they got it.

There was a political avarice in Brooklyn in the management of our public taxes which handicapped the local government.  For a long while I had been thinking about some way of presenting this sin to my people, when one day a woman, Barbara Allen by name, dropping in fatal illness, was picked up at the Fulton Ferry House, and died in the ambulance.  On her arm was a basket of cold victuals she had lugged from house to house.  In the rags of her clothing were found deposit slips in the savings banks of Brooklyn—­for $20,000.  The case was unique at that time, because in those days great wealth was unknown, even in New York, and the houses in Brooklyn were homes—­not museums.  Twenty thousand dollars was a fortune.  It was a precedent that established miserliness as an actual sin, a dissipation just as deadly as that of the spendthrift.  It was a tragic scene from the drama of life, and its surprise was avarice.  The whole country read about Barbara Allen, and wondered what new strange disease