There was no use getting them to promise to come and take out a license. I soon learned that there was but one way, making them understand that unless that license was taken out within a stated time I would take them to court. Looking over my records I find that Spaniards, Italians, French, Bohemians, and even Polacks to whom I gave three months’ time kept their word. At the time of my call the worker of the family was on a strike, had lost his job, or had sickness or some other misfortune that consumed his earnings. In such cases I asked them to name the date before which they could get their dog a license. There is not a delinquent among the races I have named on my books. When I first started in I treated the Irish the same way, but they soon taught me that it was casting pearls before swine. All the rudeness, the only rudeness I met in tenements was from persons who boasted of being either Irish or Germans. The Germans soon got a change of heart. The last half of my four years in the tenements the French themselves were not more courteous. Rude or courteous, a German is always neat, in his home as well as in his person. It seems to me the longer I worked in the slums the more I discovered in the Irish to laugh at or deplore. I write of them as Irish because they were continually assuring me: “I’m Irish. My father and mother were born in this country, and I was born here. But I’m Irish, me and my children, too.” The little music-teacher who lived in the room under mine in Miss O’Brien’s Greenwich Village rooming-house explained to me the reason why the Irish have a contempt for Italians. I told her of having stopped in the Italian church on East Twelfth Street and having seen a Liberty-bond button attached to the garments of the Virgin and the Child. “Did it mean that some worshipper had made an offering of two Liberty bonds?” I asked, and the idea seemed to me very beautiful—combining devotion and patriotism. The little music-teacher tossed her head scornfully. “We Irish Catholics have nothing to do with Italians,” she informed me. “See how they allow the Pope to be treated. You wait and see how he’ll be treated when he comes to live in Ireland.” “Do you think this Pope will do that?” I inquired, for the thought was not only new to me, but it seemed as improbable as moving St. Peter’s itself. “It will be done within five years, maybe within two,” she asserted positively. Though that little woman was the third generation born in the United States, she took it as an insult to be referred to as an American. And the threats she used to breathe against the Democratic Party. Until I met her I had fancied that all my fellow citizens with Irish blood in their veins were devoted Democrats. She strangled that belief.