FROM THE LIFE
tinized him. Hence, also, Harris's righteously defiant look and the complacency of his announcement, "They don't think that we can re-elect you." He was the meek bearer of the bowstring.
The condemned man took a few turns up and down the room, paused before a window, turned suddenly, and said: "When you look out that window and see the upper town—up there on the Hill—you see it as the abode of decency and virtue and everything that's godly. And you see it warred on by the vice of the lower town—where everything is sin. Don't you?"
Harris did not answer. He laid aside his hat on the table and crossed his arms, settling himself to hear an argument and reply to it as soon as he had heard it all.
"When I look out that window," the District Attorney continued, "I see the upper town as the abode chiefly of the men who keep the lower wards living in the dirt and the evil conditions that breed sin. I see the lower town working in conditions of pollution to pay the money that makes the Hill rich—decent—respectable. That's the difference between us. And there doesn't seem to be any way of reconciling it."
His office was on the sixth floor of the Settle Building. He could look down on the roofs of half the city in the morning sunlight. "It isn't vice that I want to fight any more," he said. "It's the conditions that make vice."
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