_
The State Department of Charities was a rudimentary affair in those
days, just as Queed had said. Its appropriation was impossibly meager,
even with the niggard's increase just wrung from the legislature. The
whole Department fitted cozily into a single room in the Capitol; it was
small as a South American army, this Department, consisting, indeed, of
but the two generals. But the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary
worked together like a team of horses. They had already done wonders,
and their hopes were high with still more wonders to perform. In
especial there was the reformatory. The legislature had adjourned
without paying any attention to the reformatory, exactly as it had been
meant to do. But a bill had been introduced, at all events, and the
_Post_ had carried a second editorial, expounding and urging the plan;
several papers in the smaller cities of the State had followed the
_Post's_ lead; and thus the issue had been fairly launched, with the
ground well broken for a successful campaign two years later.
The office of the Department was a ship-shape place, with its two desks,
a big one and a little one; the typewriter table; the rows and rows of
letter-files on shelves; a sectional bookcase containing Charities
reports from other States, with two shelves reserved for authoritative
books by such writers as Willoughby, Smathers, and Conant.
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