Wayne Craighill was, in the fullest sense, a child of the city. Its oldest blood was in his veins. His mother had been a Wayne, the daughter of a merchant whose great-grandfather had fought in the Continental army, and whose grandfather had shared Perry’s glory on Lake Erie. The Craighills were not so old on this soil, but the name was not a negligible one in local history. Wayne’s grandfather Craighill had sat in the State Legislature and in Congress, and when Roger Craighill married the only daughter of the house of Wayne and the last of the family, the best blood of the State was united. The Craighill building, rising tower-like in the steep, narrow street of this many-towered Babel, spoke not merely for present affluence, but for the prescience that had secured and held the iron hills surrounding. Eastern Pennsylvania is better known in song, story and history than the state’s western hills, but the Greater City, big, brawny, powerful, sprawled over valley and hill where the broad rivers gather new courage for their adventure seaward, hides in its iron heart many and sonorous Iliads. It may fairly be said that Pennsylvania is our most typical state and Pittsburg our most typical city, for here the weakness and strength of the democracy wage daily war. Here political corruption has been venomously manifested. Those who seek to account for the unaccountable ask whether the old Scotch clan-instinct has not reasserted itself in the politics of the state. The question is suggestive; but it may not be discussed in these pages. The spirit of Democracy, brooding upon the hills, and looking down upon the City of the Iron Heart, must smile often, wondering that a people so highly favoured and with antecedents so honourable, tamely submit to plunder and bend their necks so meekly to the spoilsman. But a new era was even now at hand. “There shall be an highway for the remnant of his people,” declared Isaiah, prophet of the day of kings, but a higher light was already stealing into the Iron City. The “remnant” was proving its own quality by searching out the squalor of its back doors and “runs” where wan spectres of Decadence elbowed ill-begotten, helpless, staring-eyed Defectives and Dependents.