Backlund.
Over the previous two days, Klein and Mike had followed Old Kohler on a "tour" of many places in East Borough.
They had seen five or six people crammed into one room, and that was far from the worst of it. A single ordinary bedroom might sleep ten people, with precise divisions of who had the floor and who could use the room by day or by night. That was the norm.
They had seen homeless people driven out at midnight, wandering the streets like zombies;
They had seen women standing numbly by the roadside or in bars, and drinkers who drank to excess, were quick to violence, and had no desire to think about the future;
They had seen the dust filling a lead-white factory, and the women working there without any protection...
After two days of interviews, the only bright spot was a laundress named Liv, who insisted on sending her daughters to the church's night school...
But that glimmer belonged only to a soul who refused to surrender to fate... Its presence merely threw East Borough's dreadful conditions into sharper relief!
Having witnessed it all, Mike was furious. He was a journalist with a sense of justice, even if he was no longer young, tended to be stingy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to get an interview. He had never lost sight of why he had become a reporter.
He had initially undertaken the investigation at the request of an influential figure. After several days of visits, though, he genuinely wanted to do something for East Borough and the people at the very bottom who lived there.
And a journalist's most powerful weapon was his pen! He would not only report the situation truthfully to the man who had commissioned him, but also write an editorial