A few weeks later Schuyler Colfax, speaker of the House of Representatives, passed on.  In the vortex of political feeling his integrity was attacked but I never believed a word of the accusations.  Ten millions of people hoped for his election as President.  He was my personal friend.  When the scandal of his life was most violent, he explained it all away satisfactorily in my own house.  This explanation was a confidence that I cannot break, but it made me ever afterwards a loyal friend to his memory.  He was one of those upon whom was placed the burden of living down a calumny, and when he died Congress adjourned in his honour.  Members of the legislature in his own country gathered about his obsequies.  I have known many men in public life, but a more lovable man than Schuyler Colfax I never knew.  The generous words he spoke of me on the last Sabbath of his life I shall never forget.  The perpetual smile on his face was meanly caricatured, and yet it was his benediction upon a world unworthy of him.

In 1885, from far away over the sea came muffled thunder tones of war and rebellion.  The deadly nightshade was indigenous to our times.  The dynamite outrages at Westminster Hall and the House of Commons were explosions we in America heard faintly.  Their importance was exaggerated.  A hundred years back, the kings of England, of France, of Russia who died in their beds were rare.  The violent incidents of life were less conspicuous as the years went on.  What riots Philadelphia had seen during the old firemen’s battle in the streets!  And those theatrical riots in New York, when the military was called out, and had to fire into the mob, because the friends of Macready and Forrest could not agree as to which was the better actor!

An alarming number of disputes came up at this time over wills.  The Orphan Courts were over-worked with these cases.  I suggested a rule for all wills:  one-third at least to the wife, and let the children share alike.  When a child receives more than a wife, the family is askew.  A man’s wife should be first in every ambition, in every provision.  One-third to the wife is none too much.  The worst family feuds proceed from inequality of inheritance.

This question of rights under testamentary gifts of the rich was not so important, however, as the alarming growth in our big cities of the problem of the poor.  The tenement house became a menace to cleanliness.  Never before were there so many people living in unswept, unaired tenements.  Stairs below stairs, stairs above stairs, where all the laws of health were violated.  The Sanitary Protective League was organised to alleviate these conditions.  Asiatic cholera was striding over Europe, and the tenement house of America was a resting place for it here.

After a lecturing trip in the spring of 1885 through Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, I returned to Brooklyn, delighted with the confidence with which the people looked forward to the first Cleveland administration.  On the day that $50,000,000 was voted for the River and Harbour Bill, both parties sharing in the spoils, American politics touched bottom.  There were symptoms of recuperation in Mr. Cleveland’s initiative.  Belligerency was abandoned as a hopeless campaign.