 5. So much for most of the opposition to the reform. There was, however, some honest and at least partially justifiable opposition both to certain of the methods advocated by civil service reformers and to certain of the civil service reformers themselves. The pet shibboliths of the opponents of the reform were that the system we proposed to introduce would give rise to mere red-tape bureaucracy and that the reformers were Pharisees. Neither statement was true. Each statement contained some truth. If men are not to be appointed by favoritism, wise or unwise, honest or dishonest, they must be appointed in some automatic way, which generally means by competitive examination. The easiest kind of competitive examination is an examination in writing. This is entirely appropriate for certain classes of work, for lawyers, stenographers, typewriters, clerks, mathematicians, and assistants in an astronomical observatory, for instance. It is utterly inappropriate for carpenters, detectives, and mounted cattle inspectors along the Rio Grande, to instance three types of employment, as to which I had to do battle, to prevent well-meaning bureaucrats from insisting on written competitive entrance examinations. It would be quite possible to hold a very good competitive examination for mounted cattle inspectors by means of practical tests in brand reading and shooting with rifle and revolver, in writing mean horses and in roping and throwing steers. I did my best to have examinations of this kind instituted, but my proposal was of precisely the type which most shocks the routine official mind, and I was never able to get it put into practical effect. The important point, and the point most often forgotten by Zell's civil service reformers, was to remember that the routine competitive examination was merely a means to an end. It did not always produce ideal results. But it was normally better than a system of appointments for spoils purposes. It sometimes worked out very well indeed, and in most big governmental offices it not only gave satisfactory results, but was the only system under which good results could be obtained. For instance, when I was police commissioner we appointed some 2,000 policemen at one time. It was utterly impossible for the commissioners each to examine personally the six or eight thousand applicants. Therefore they had to be appointed either on the recommendation of outsiders, or else by written competitive examination. The latter method, the one we adopted, was infinitely preferable. We held a rigid physical and moral pass examination, and then among those who passed we held a written competitive examination requiring only the knowledge that any good primary common school education would meet, that is, a test of ordinary intelligence and simple mental training. Occasionally a man who would have been a good officer failed, and occasionally a man who turned out to be a bad officer passed, but as a rule the men with intelligence sufficient to enable them to answer the questions were of a type very distinctly above that of those who failed. The answers returned to some of the questions gave an illuminating idea of the intelligence of those answering them. For instance, one of our questions in a given examination was a request to name five of the New England states. One competitor, obviously a foreign berth, answered England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cork. His neighbor, who had probably looked over his shoulder, but who had north of Ireland prejudices, made the same answer except that he substituted Belfast for Cork. A request for a statement as to the life of Abraham Lincoln elicited, among other less startling pieces of information, the fact that many of the applicants thought that he was a general in the Civil War. Several thought that he was president of the Confederate states. Three thought that he had been assassinated by Jefferson Davis. One by Thomas Jefferson. One by Garfield. Several by Guiteau. And one by Ballington Booth. The last representing a memory of the fact that he had been shot by a man named Booth, to whose surname the writer added the name with which he was most familiar in connection therewith. A request to name five of the states that seceded in 1861 received answers that included almost every state in the Union. It happened to be at the time of the silver agitation in the West, and the Rocky Mountain states accordingly figured in a large percentage of the answers. Some of the men thought that Chicago was on the Pacific Ocean. There's an answer to a query as to who was the head of the United States government, wavered between myself and recorder Joff. One brilliant genius, for inscrutable reasons, placed the leadership in the New York Fire Department. Now of course some of the men who answered these questions wrong were nevertheless quite capable of making good policemen. But it is fair to assume that on the average the candidate who has a rudimentary knowledge of the government, geography, and history of his country is a little better fitted, in point of intelligence, to be a policeman than the one who has not. Therefore I felt convinced, after full experience, that as regards very large classes of public servants, by far the best way to choose the men for appointment was by means of a written competitive examination. But I absolutely split off from the bulk of my professional civil service reform friends when they advocated written competitive examinations for promotion. In the police department I found these examinations a serious handicap in the way of getting the best men promoted, and never in any office did I find that the written competitive promotion examination did any good. The reason for a written competitive entrance examination is that it is impossible for the head of the office, or the candidate's perspective immediate supervisor, himself to know the average candidate or to test his ability. But when once in office the best way to test any man's ability is by long experience in seeing him actually at work. This promotion should depend upon the judgment formed of him by his superiors. So much for the objections to the examinations. Now for the objections to the men who advocated the reform. As a rule these men were high-minded and disinterested. Certain of them, men like the leaders in the Maryland and Indiana reform associations, for instance, Messer's Bonaparte and Rose, Falk and Swift added common sense, broad sympathy, and practical efficiency to their high-mindedness. But in New York, Philadelphia and Boston there really was a certain mental and moral thinness among the very many of the leaders in the civil service reform movement. It was this quality which made them so profoundly antipathetic to vigorous and intensely human people of the stamp of my friend Joe Murray, who, as I have said, always felt that my civil service reform affiliations formed the one blot on an otherwise excellent public record. The civil service reform movement was one from above downwards, and the men who took the lead in it were not men who, as a rule, possessed a very profound sympathy with or understanding of the ways of thought and life of their average fellow citizen. They were not men who themselves desired to be letter-carriers or clerks or policemen, or to have their friends appointed to these positions. Having no temptation themselves in this direction, they were eagerly anxious to prevent other people getting such appointments as a reward for political services. In this they were quite right. It would be impossible to run any big public office to advantage save along the lines of the strictest application of civil service reform principles, and the system should be extended throughout our governmental service far more widely than is now the case. But there are other and more vital reforms than this. Too many civil service reformers, when the trial came, proved tepidly indifferent or actively hostile to reforms that were of profound and far-reaching social and industrial consequence. Many of them were at best lukewarm about movements for the improvement of the conditions of toil and life among men and women who labor under hard surroundings and were positively hostile to movements which curbed the power of the great corporation magnets and directed into useful, instead of pernicious channels, the activities of the great corporation lawyers who advised them. Most of the newspapers which regarded themselves as the special champions of civil service reform and as the highest exponents of civic virtue and which distrusted the average citizen and shuddered over the coarseness of the professional politicians were nevertheless given to vices even more contemptible than, although not so gross as, those they denounced and derided. Their editors were refined men of cultivated tastes whose pet temptations were backbiting, mean slander, and the snobbish worship of anything clothed in wealth and the outward appearances of conventional respectability. They were not robust or powerful men. They felt ill at ease in the company of rough, strong men. They often had in them a vein of physical timidity. They avenged themselves to themselves for an uneasy subconsciousness of their own shortcomings by sitting in cloistered or rather pleasantly upholstered seclusion and sneering at and lying about men who made them feel uncomfortable. Sometimes these were bad men who made them feel uncomfortable by the exhibition of course and repellent vice, and sometimes they were men of high character who held ideals of courage and of service to others, and who looked down and ward against the shortcomings of swollen wealth, and the effortless, easy lies of those whose horizon is bounded by a sheltered and timid respectability. These newspapers, owned and edited by these men, although free from the repulsive vulgarity of the yellow press, were susceptible to influence by the privileged interests, and were almost or quite as hostile to manliness as they were to unrefined vice, and were much more hostile to it than to the typical shortcomings of wealth and refinement. They favored civil service reform, they favored copyright laws, and the removal of the tariff on works of art. They favored all the proper and even more strongly all the improper movements for international peace and arbitration. In short, they favored all good and many goody-goody measures so long as they did not cut deep into social wrong or make demands on national and individual virility. They opposed, or were lukewarm about, efforts to build up the army in the Navy, for they were not sensitive concerning national honor, and above all they opposed every non-milk and water effort, however sane, to change our social and economic system in such a fashion as to substitute the ideal of justice towards all for the ideal of kindly charity from the favored few to the possibly grateful many. Some of the men foremost in the struggle for civil service reform have taken a position of honorable leadership in the battle for those other and more vital reforms. But many of them promptly abandoned the field of effort for decency when the battle took the form of, not a fight against the petty grafting of small bosses and politicians, a vitally necessary battle, be it remembered, but of a fight against the great entrenched powers of privilege, a fight to secure justice through the law for ordinary men and women, instead of leaving them to suffer cruel injustice, either because the law failed to protect them or because it was twisted from its legitimate purposes into a means for oppressing them. One of the many reasons why the boss so often keeps his hold, especially in municipal matters, is, or at least has been in the past, because so many of the men who claim to be reformers have been blind to the need of working in human fashion for social and industrial betterment. Such words as boss and machine now imply evil, but both the implication the words carry and the definition of the words themselves are somewhat vague. A leader is necessary, but his opponents always call him a boss. An organization is necessary, but the men in opposition always call it a machine. Nevertheless, there is a real and deep distinction between the leader and the boss, between organizations and machines. A political leader who fights openly for principles and who keeps his position of leadership by stirring the consciences and convincing the intellects of his followers, so that they have confidence in him and will follow him because they can achieve greater results under him than under anyone else, is doing work which is indispensable in a democracy. The boss, on the other hand, is a man who does not gain his power by open means, but by secret means, and usually by corrupt means. Some of the worst and most powerful bosses in our political history either held no public office or else some unimportant public office. They made no appeal either to intellect or conscience. Their work was done behind closed doors and chiefly consisted in the use of that greed which gives in order that they get it in return. A boss of this kind can pull wires and conventions, can manipulate members of the legislature, can control the giving or withholding of office, and serves as the intermediary for bringing together the powers of corrupt politics and corrupt business. If he is at one end of the social scale, he may, through his agents, traffic in the most brutal forms of vice and give protection to the purveyors of shame and sin in return for money bribes. At the other end of the scale he may be the means of securing favors from high public officials, legislative or executive, to great industrial interests, the transaction being sometimes a naked manner of bargain and sale, and sometimes being carried on in such matter that both parties there too can more or less successfully disguise it to their consciousness as in the public interest. The machine is simply another name for the kind of organization which is certain to grow up in a party or section of a party controlled by such bosses as these and by their henchmen, whereas, of course, an effective organization of decent men is essential in order to secure decent politics. If these bosses were responsible for nothing but pure wickedness, they would probably last but a short time in any community. And in any event, if the men who are horrified by their wickedness were themselves as practical and as thoroughly in touch with human nature, the bosses would have a short shift. The trouble is that the boss does understand human nature and that he feels a place which the reformer cannot feel unless he likewise understands human nature. Sometimes the boss is a man who cares for political power purely for its own sake as he might care for any other hobby. More often he has in view some definitely selfish object such as political or financial advancement. He can rarely accomplish much unless he has another side to him. A successful boss is very apt to be a man who, in addition to committing wickedness in his own interest, also does look after the interest of others, even if not from good motives. There are some communities so fortunate that there are very few men who have private interest to be served, and in these the power of the boss is at a minimum. There are many country communities of this type. But in communities where there is poverty and ignorance, the conditions are ripe for the growth of a boss. Moreover, wherever big business interests are liable either to be improperly favored or improperly discriminated against and blackmailed by public officials, and the result is just as vicious in one case as in the other, the boss is almost certain to develop. The best way of getting at this type of boss is by keeping the public conscience aroused in alert so that it will tolerate neither improper attack upon nor improper favoritism towards these corporations, and will quickly punish any public servant guilty of either. There is often much good in the type of boss, especially common in big cities, who fulfills toward the people of his district in rough and ready fashion the position of friend and protector. He uses his influence to get jobs for young men who need them. He goes into court for a wild young fellow who has gotten into trouble. He helps out with cash or credit the widow who is in straits, or the breadwinner who has crippled, or for some other cause temporarily out of work. He organizes clam bakes and chowder parties and picnics, and is consulted by the local labor leaders when a cut in wages is threatened. For some of his constituents he does proper favors, and for others wholly improper favors, but he preserves human relations with all. He may be a very bad and very corrupt man. A man whose action in blackmailing and protecting vices is of far-reaching damage to his constituents. But these constituents are for the most part men and women who struggle hard against poverty, and with whom the problem of living is very real and very close. They would prefer clean and honest government if this clean and honest government is accompanied by human sympathy, human understanding. But an appeal made to them for virtue in the abstract, an appeal made by good men who do not really understand their needs, will often pass quite unheeded if on the other side stands the boss, the friend and benefactor who may have been guilty of much wrongdoing in things that they are hardly aware concern them, but who appeals to them, not only for the sake of favors to come, but in the name of gratitude and loyalty, and above all of understanding and fellow feeling. They have a feeling of clan loyalty to him. His and their relations may be substantially those which are right and proper among primitive people still in the clan stage of moral development. The successful fight against this type of vicious boss, and the type of vicious politics which produces it, can be made only by men who have a genuine fellow feeling for and understanding of the people for and with whom they are to work, and who in practical fashion seek their social and industrial benefit. There are communities of poor men whose lives are hard, in which the boss, though he would be out of place in a more advanced community, if fundamentally an honest man, meets a real need which would not otherwise be met. Because of his limitations in other than purely local matters, it may be our duty to fight such a boss, but it may also be our duty to recognize, within his limitations, both his sincerity and his usefulness. Yet again, even the boss who really is evil, like the businessman who really is evil, may on certain points be sound and be doing good work. It may be the highest duty of the patriotic public servant to work with the big boss or the big business man on these points, while refusing to work with him on others. In the same way there are many self-styled reformers whose conduct is such as to warrant Tom Reed's bitter remark that when Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was ignorant of the infinite possibilities contained in the word reform. Yet nonetheless it is our duty to work for the reforms these men champion without regard to the misconduct of the men themselves on other points. I have known in my life many big business men and many big political bosses who often or even generally did evil, but who on some occasions and on certain issues were right. I never hesitated to do battle against these men when they were wrong, and on the other hand, as long as they were going my way I was glad to have them do so. To have repudiated their aid when they were right and were striving for a right end, and for what was a benefit to the people, no matter what their motives might have been, would have been childish and, moreover, would have itself been misconduct against the people. My duty was to stand with everyone while he was right, and to stand against him when he went wrong, and this I have tried to do as regards individuals and as regards groups of individuals. When a business man or labor leader, politician or reformer is right, I support him. When he goes wrong, I leave him. When Mr. Lorimer upheld the war for the liberation of Cuba, I supported him. When he became United States Senator by improper methods, I opposed him. The principles or methods which the socialists advocate in which I believe to be in the interest of the people I support, and those which I believe to be against the interest of the people I oppose. Moreover, when a man has done evil but changes and works for decency and righteousness, and when, as far as I can see, the change is real and the man's conducts sincere, then I welcome him and work heartily with him as an equal with an equal. For thirty years after the civil war the creed of mere materialism was rampant in both American politics and American business, and many, many strong men, in accordance with the prevailing commercial and political morality, did things for which they deserved blame and condemnation, but if they now sincerely change and strive for better things, it is unwise and unjust to bar them from fellowship. So long as they work for evil, smite them with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. When they change and show their faith by their works, remember the words of Ezekiel. If the wicked will turn from all the sins he has committed and keep all my statutes and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed they shall not be mentioned unto him. In his righteousness that he hath done he shall live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die, sayeth the Lord God, and not that he should return from his ways and live? Every man who has been in practical politics grows to realize that politicians, big and little, are no more all of them bad than they are all of them good. Many of these men are very bad men indeed, but there are others among them, and some among those held up to social albuquay too, who even although they may have done much that is evil, also so traits of sterling worth, which many of their critics holy lack. There are few men for whom I have ever felt a more cordial and contemptuous dislike than for some of the bosses and big professional politicians with whom I have been brought into contact. On the other hand, in the case of some political leaders who are most bitterly attacked as bosses, I grew to know certain sides of their characters which inspired in me a very genuine regard and respect. To read much of the assault on Senator Hanna one would have thought that he was a man incapable of patriotism or a far-sided devotion to the country's good. I was brought into intimate contact with him only during the two-and-a-half years immediately preceding his death. I was then president, and Perforce watched all his actions at close range. During that time he showed himself to be a man of rugged sincerity of purpose, of great courage and loyalty, and of unswerving devotion to the interests of the nation and the people as he saw those interests. He was as sincerely desirous of helping laboring men as of helping capitalists. His ideals were in many ways not my ideals, and there were points which, both by temperament and by conviction, we were far apart. Before this time he had always been unfriendly to me, and I do not think he ever grew to like me, at any rate not until the very end of his life. Moreover I came to the presidency under circumstances which, if he had been a smaller man, would have inevitably thrown him into violent antagonism to me. He was the close and intimate friend of President McKinley. He was McKinley's devoted ally and follower and his trusted advisor, who was in complete sympathy with him. Partly because of this friendship, his position in the Senate and in the country was unique. With McKinley's sudden death Senator Hanna found himself bereft of his dearest friend, while I, who had just come to the presidency, was in his view an untried man, whose trustworthiness on many public questions was at least doubtful. Ordinarily, as has been shown, not only in our history but in the history of all other countries, in countless instances, over and over again, this situation would have meant suspicion, ill-will, and at the last open and violent antagonism. Such was not the result in this case, primarily because Senator Hanna had in him the quality that enabled him to meet a serious crisis with dignity, with power, and with disinterested desire to work for the common good. Within a few days of my accession he called on me, and with the entire friendliness and obvious sincerity, but also with entire self-respect, explained that he mourned McKinley as probably no other man did, that he had not been especially my friend, but that he wished me to understand that thenceforward, on every question where he could conscientiously support me, I could count upon his giving me as loyal aid as it was in his power to render. He added that this must not be understood as committing him to favor me for nomination and election, because that matter must be left to take care of itself as events should decide. But that aside from this, what he said was to be taken literally. In other words, he would do his best to make my administration a success by supporting me heartily on every point, on which he conscientiously could, and that this I could count upon. He kept his word absolutely. He never became especially favorable to my nomination, and most of his close friends became bitterly opposed to me and used every effort to persuade him to try to bring about my downfall. Most men in his position would have been tempted to try to make capital at my expense by antagonizing me and discrediting me so as to make my policies fail, just for the sake of making them fail. Senator Hanna, on the contrary, did everything possible to make them succeed. He kept his word in the letter and the spirit, and on every point on which he felt conscientiously able to support me, he gave me the hardiest and most effective support, and did all in his power to make my administration a success, and this with no hope of any reward for himself, of any gratitude from me, or of any appreciation by the public at large, but solely because he deemed such action necessary for the well-being of the country as a whole. CHAPTER V My experience with Senator Quay was similar. I had no personal relations with him before I was president, and knew nothing of him safe by hearsay. Soon after I became president, Senator Quay called upon me, told me he had known me very slightly, that he thought most men who claimed to be reformers were hypocrites, but that he deemed me sincere, that he thought conditions had become such that aggressive courage and honesty were necessary in order to remedy them, that he believed I intended to be a good and efficient president, and that to the best of his ability he would support me in making my administration a success. He kept his word with absolute good faith. He had been in the Civil War, and was a Medal of Honor man, and I think my having been in the Spanish War gave him at the outset a kindly feeling toward me. He was also a very well-read man. I owe to him, for instance, my acquaintance with the writings of the Finnish novelist Topolius. Not only did he support me on almost every public question in which I was most interested, including I am convinced every one on which he felt he could conscientiously do so, but he also, at the time of his death, gave a striking proof of his disinterested desire to render a service to certain poor people, and this under conditions in which not only would he never know if the service were rendered, but in which he had no reason to expect that his part in it would ever be made known to any other man. Cue was descended from a French voyageur who had some Indian blood in him. He was proud of this Indian blood, took in a special interest in Indians, and whenever Indians came to Washington they always called on him. Once during my administration a delegation of Iroquois came over from Canada to call on me at the White House. Their visit had in it something that was pathetic as well as amusing. They represented the descendants of the six nations, who fled to Canada after Sullivan harried their towns in the Revolutionary War. Now a century and a quarter later their people thought that they would like to come back into the United States, and these representatives had called upon me with the dim hope that perhaps I could give their tribes land on which they could settle. As soon as they reached Washington they asked Cue to bring them to call on me, which he did, telling me that of course their errand was hopeless, and that he had explained as much to them, but that they would like me to extend the courtesy of an interview. At the close of the interview, which had been conducted with all the solemnities of Calamette and Wampom, the Indians filed out. Cue, before following them, turned to me with his usual emotionless face and said, Good-bye, Mr. President. This reminds one of the flight of a Tartar tribe, doesn't it? I answered, So you're fine of DeQuincy, Senator? To which Cue responded, Yes, always like DeQuincy, good-bye. And away he went with the tribesmen who seemed to have walked out of a remote past. Cue had become particularly concerned about the Delaware's and the Indian Territory. He felt that the Interior Department did not do them justice. He also felt that his colleagues of the Senate took no interest in them. When in the spring of 1904 he lay in his house mortally sick, he sent me word that he had something important to say to me, and would have himself carried round to see me. I sent back word not to think of doing so, and that on my way back from church next Sunday I would stop in and call on him. This I accordingly did. He was lying in his bed, death written on his face. He thanked me for coming, and then explained that, as he was on the point of death, and knew he would never return to Washington, it was late spring and he was about to leave. He wished to see me to get my personal promise that, after he died, I would myself look after the interests of the Delaware Indians. He added that he did not trust the Interior Department, although he knew that I did not share his views on this point, and that still lest did he believe that any of his colleagues in the Senate would exert themselves in the interests of the Delaware's, and that therefore he wished my personal assurance that I would personally see that no injustice was done them. I told him I would do so, and then added, in rather perfunctory fashion, that he must not take such a gloomy view of himself, that when he got away for the summer I hoped he would recover and be back all right when Congress opened. A gleam came into the old fighter's eyes and he answered, No, I am dying and you know it. I don't mind dying, but I do wish it were possible for me to get off into the Great North Woods and crawl out on a rock in the sun and die like a wolf. I never saw him again. When he died I sent a telegram of sympathy to his wife. A paper which constantly preached reform and which kept up its circulation by the no less constant practice of slander, a paper which, in theory, condemned all public men who violated the Eighth Commandment, and in practice subsisted by incessant violation of the Ninth, assailed me for sending my message to the dead man's wife. I knew the editors of this paper, and the editor who was their predecessor. They had led lives of bodily ease and the avoidance of bodily risk. They earned their livelihood by the practice of mendacity for profit, and they derived malignant judgment on a dead man who, whatever his faults, had in his youth freely risked his life for great ideal, and who, when death was already clutching his breast, had spent almost his last breath on behalf of a humble and friendless people whom he had served with disinterested loyalty. There is no greater duty than to war on the corrupt and unprincipled boss, and on the corrupt and unprincipled businessman, and for the matter of that on the corrupt and unprincipled labor-leader also, and on the corrupt and unprincipled editor, and on anyone else who is corrupt and unprincipled. But where the conditions are such, whether in politics or in business, that the great majority of men have behaved in a way which is gradually seemed to be improper, but which at one time did not conflict with the generally accepted morality, then the warfare on the system should not include warfare on the men themselves unless they declined to amend their ways and to disassociate themselves from the system. There are many good, unimaginative citizens who in politics or in business act in accordance with accepted standards, in a matter of course way, without questioning these standards, until something happens which sharply arouses them to the situation, whereupon they try to work for better things. The proper course in such event is to let bygones be bygones, and if the men proved by their actions the sincerity of their conversion, heartily to work with them for the betterment of business and political conditions. By the time that I was ending my career as civil service commissioner, I was already growing to understand that mere improvement in political conditions by itself was not enough. I dimly realized that an even greater fight must be waged to improve economic conditions and to secure social and industrial justice, justice between individuals and justice as between classes. I began to see that political effort was largely valuable as it found expression and resulted in such social and industrial betterment. I was gradually puzzling out, or trying to puzzle out, the answers to the various questions. Some as yet unsolvable to any of us, but for the solution of which it is the bound and duty of us all to work. I had grown to realize very keenly that the duty of the government to protect women and children must be extended to include the protection of all the crushable elements of labor. I saw that it was the affair of all our people to see that justice obtained between the big corporation and its employees and between the big corporation and its small arrivals, as well as customers and the general public. I saw that it was the affair of all of us, and not only of the employer, if dividends went up and wages went down, that it was to the interest of us all that a full share of the benefit of improved machinery should go to the workmen who used the machinery, and also that it was to the interest of all of us that each man, whether brain worker or hand worker, should do the best work of which he was capable, and that there should be some correspondence between the value of the work and the value of the reward. It is these and many similar questions which in their sum make up the great social and industrial problems of today, the most interesting and important of the problems with which our public life must deal. In handling these problems I believe that much can be done by the government. Furthermore, I believe that after all that the government can do has been done, there will remain as the most vital of all factors the individual character of the average man and the average woman. No governmental action can do more than supplement individual action. Moreover, there must be collective action of kinds distinct from governmental action. A body of public opinion must be formed, must make itself felt, and in the end transform and be transformed by the gradual raising of individual standards of conduct. It is curious to see how difficult it is to make some men understand that insistence upon one factor does not and must not mean failure to fully recognize other factors. The selfish individual needs to be taught that we must now shackle cunning by law exactly as a few centuries back we shackled force by law. Unrestricted individualism spells ruin to the individual himself. But so does the elimination of individualism, whether by law or custom. It is a capital error to fail to recognize the vital need of good laws. It is also a capital error to believe that good laws will accomplish anything unless the average man has the right stuff in him. The toiler, the manual laborer, has received less than justice, and he must be protected, both by law, by custom, and by the exercise of his right to increase his wage, and yet to decrease the quantity and quality of his work will work only evil. There must be a far greater need of respect and reward for the hand worker than we now give him if our society is to be put on a sound basis, and this respect and reward cannot be given him unless he is as ambitious to do the best possible work as is the highest type of brain worker, whether doctor or writer or artist. There must be a raising of standards and not a leveling down to the standard of the poorest and most inefficient. There is urgent need of intelligent governmental action to assist in making the life of the man who tills the soil all that it should be, and to see that the manual worker gets his full share of the reward for what he helps produce. But if either farmer, mechanic, or day laborer is shiftless or lazy, if he shirks downright hard work, if he is stupid or self-indulgent, then no law can save him, and he must give way to a better type. I suppose that some good people will misunderstand what I say, and will insist on taking only half of it as representing the whole. Let me repeat. When I say that even after we have all the good laws necessary, the chief factor in any given man's success or failure must be that man's own character, it must not be inferred that I am in the least minimizing the importance of these laws, the real and vital need for them. The struggle for individual advancement and development can be brought to naught, or indefinitely retarded by the absence of law, or by bad law. It can be immeasurably aided by organized effort on the part of the state. Collective action and individual action, public law, and private character are both necessary. It is only by a slow and patient inward transformation, such as these laws aid in bringing about, that men are really helped upward in their struggle for a higher and a fuller life. Recognition of individual character as the most important of all factors does not mean failure fully to recognize that we must have good laws, and that we must have our best men in office to enforce these laws. The nation collectively will in this way be able to be of real and genuine service to each of us individually, and on the other hand, the wisdom of the collective action will mainly depend on the high individual average of citizenship. The relationship of man and woman is the fundamental relationship that stands at the base of the whole social structure. Much can be done by law towards putting women on a footing of complete and entire equal rights with man, including the right to vote, the right to hold and use property, and the right to enter any profession she desires on the same terms as a man. Yet when this has been done it will amount to little unless on the one hand the man himself realizes his duty to the woman, and unless on the other hand the woman realizes that she has no claim to rights unless she performs the duties that go with those rights and that alone justify her in appealing to them. A cruel, selfish, or licentious man is an important member of the community, but after all his actions are no worse in the long run than those of the woman who is content to be a parasite on others, who is cold, selfish, caring for nothing but frivolous pleasure and ignoble ease. The law of worthy effort, the law of service for a worthy end, without regard to whether it brings pleasure or pain, is the only right law of life, whether for man or for woman. The man must not be selfish, nor, if the woman is wise, will she let the man grow selfish, and this not only for her own sake but for his. One of the prime needs is to remember that almost every duty is composed of two seemingly conflicting elements, and that over insistence on one to the exclusion of the other may defeat its own end. Any man who studies the statistics of the birth rate among the Native Americans of New England, or among the Native French of France, needs not to be told that when prudence and forethought are carried to the point of cold selfishness and self-indulgence, the race is bound to disappear. Taking into account the woman who for good reasons do not marry, taking into account the women who for good reasons do not marry, or who when married are childless or able to have but one or two children, it is evident that the married woman able to have children must, on an average, have four, or the race will not perpetuate itself. This is the mere statement of a self-evident truth. Yet foolish and self-indulgent people often resent this statement as if it were in some way possible by denunciation to reverse the facts of nature, and on the other hand, improvident and shiftless people, inconsiderate and brutal people, treat the statement as if it justified heads of families in having enormous numbers of badly nourished, badly brought up, and badly cared for children for whom they make no effort to provide. A man must think well before he marries. He must be a tender and considerate husband, and realize that there is no other human being to whom he owes so much of love in regard and consideration, as he does to the woman who, with pain, bears and with labor rears the children that are his. No words can paint this foreign contempt which must be felt by all right-thinking men, not only for the brutal husband, but for the husband who fails to show full loyalty and consideration to his wife. Moreover, he must work. He must do his part in the world. On the other hand, the woman must realize that she has no more right to shirk the business of wifehood and motherhood than the man has to shirk his business as breadwinner for the household. Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly. Yet normally for the man and the woman whose welfare is more important than the welfare of any other human beings, the woman must remain the house-mother, the homekeeper, and the man must remain the breadwinner, the provider for the wife who bears his children and for the children she brings into the world. No other work is as valuable or exacting for either man or woman. It must always, in every healthy society, be for both man and woman the prime work, the most important work. Normally all other work is of secondary importance, and must come as an addition to, not a substitute for, this primary work. The partnership should be one of equal rights, one of love, of self-respect, and unselfishness, above all a partnership for the performance of the most vitally important of all duties. The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all that makes life worthwhile. Suffrage for women should be looked on from this standpoint. Personally I feel that it is exactly as much a right of women as of men to vote. But the important point with both men and women is to treat the exercise of the suffrage as a duty, which in the long run must be well performed to be of the slightest value. I always favored women's suffrage but only tepidly, until my association with women like Jane Adams and Francis Keller, who desired it as one means of enabling them to render better and more efficient service, changed me into a zealous instead of a lukewarm adherent of the cause, in spite of the fact that a few of the best women of the same type, women like Mary Anton, did not favor the movement. A vote is like a rifle. Its usefulness depends upon the character of the user. The mere possession of the vote will no more benefit men and women not sufficiently developed to use it than the possession of rifles will turn untrained Egyptian fellow-heen into soldiers. This is as true of women as of men, and no more true. Universal suffrage in Haiti has not made the Haitians able to govern themselves in any true sense, and women's suffrage in Utah in no shape or way affected the problem of polygamy. I believe in suffrage for women in America, because I think they are fit for it. I believe for women, as for men, more in the duty of fitting oneself to do well and wisely with the ballot than in the naked right to cast the ballot. I wish that people would read more books like the novels and stories at once strong and charming of Henry Bordeaux, books like Kathleen Norris's Mother and Cornelia Cumber's Preliminaries, and would use these and other such books as tracks now and then. Perhaps the following correspondence will give a better idea than I can otherwise give of the problems that in everyday life come before men and women, and of the need that the man shall show himself unselfish and considerate, and do his full share of the joint duty. I suppose you are willing to stand sponsor for the assertion that the women of the country are not doing their duty unless they have large families. I wonder if you know the real reason after all. Society and clubs are largely held to blame, but society really takes in so few people after all. I thought when I got married at twenty that it was the proper thing to have a family, and as we had very little of this world's goods, also thought it the thing to do all the necessary work for them. I have had nine children, did all my own work, including washing, ironing, house cleaning, and the care of the little ones as they came along, which was about every two years. Also sewed everything they wore, including trousers for the boys and caps and jackets for the girls while little. I also helped them in all their school work and started them in music, etc. But as they grew older I got behind the times. I never belonged to a club or a society or lodge, nor went to anyone's house scarcely. There wasn't time. In consequence I knew nothing that was going on in the town, much less the events of the country, and at the same time my husband kept growing in wisdom and knowledge, from mixing with men and hearing topics of the times discussed. At the beginning of our married life I had just as quick a mind to grasp things as he did, and had more school education, having graduated from a three years high school. My husband more and more declined to discuss things with me, as he said, I didn't know anything about it. When I'd ask he'd say, oh, you wouldn't understand if I'd tell you. So here I am at forty-five years, hopelessly dull and uninteresting, while he can mix with the brightest minds in the country as an equal. He's a strong progressive man, took very active part in the late campaign, etc. I am also progressive and tried my best, after so many years of shut-in life, to grasp the ideas you stood for, and read everything I could find during the summer and fall. But I've been out of touch with people too long now, and my husband would much rather go and talk to some woman who hasn't had any children, because she knows things. I am not specifying any particular woman. I simply bore him to death because I'm not interesting. Now tell me, how is it my fault? I was only doing what I thought was my duty. No woman can keep up with things who never talks with anyone but young children. As soon as my children grew up they took the same attitude as their father and frequently say, oh, mother doesn't know. They look up to and admire their father because he's a man of the world and knows how to act when he goes out. How can I urge my daughters now to go and raise large families? It means by the time you have lost your figure and charm for them they are all ashamed of you. Now as a believer in woman's rights, do a little talking to the men as to their duties to their wives or else refrain from urging us women to have children. I am only one of thousands of middle class respectable women who give their lives to raise a nice family and then who become bitter from the injustice done us. Don't let this go into the wastebasket but think it over. Yours respectfully, blank. New York, January 11th, 1913. My dear Mrs. Blank. Most certainly your letter will not go into the waste paperbasket. I shall think it over and show it to Mrs. Roosevelt. Will you let me say in the first place that a woman who can write such a letter is certainly not hopelessly dull and uninteresting? If the facts are as you state then I do not wonder that you feel bitterly and that you feel that the gravest kind of injustice has been done to you. I have always tried to insist to men that they should do their duty to the women even more than the women to them. Now I hardly like to write specifically about your husband because you might not like it yourself. It seems to me almost incredible that any man who is the husband of a woman who has borne him nine children should not feel that they and he are lasting her debtors. You say that you have had nine children, that you did all your own work including washing, ironing, house cleaning and the care of the little ones as they came along, that you sewed everything they wore including trousers for the boys and caps and jackets for the girls while little, that you helped them in all their school work and started them in music, but that as they grew older you got behind the times, that you never belonged to a club or society or lodge nor went to any one's house as you hardly had time to do so, and that in consequence your husband outbrew you and that your children look up to him and not to you and feel that they have outgrown you. If these facts are so, you have done a great and wonderful work and the only explanation I can possibly give of the attitude you describe on the part of your husband and children is that they do not understand what it is that you have done. I emphatically believe in unselfishness, but I also believe that it is a mistake to let other people grow selfish even when the other people are husband and children. Now I suggest that you take your letter to me, of which I send you back a copy and this letter and then select out of your family the one with whom you feel most sympathy, whether it is your husband or one of your children. Show the two letters to him or her and then have a frank talk about the matter. If any man, as you say, becomes ashamed of his wife because she has lost her figure in burying his children, then that man is a hound and has every cause to be ashamed of him. I am sending you a little book called Mother by Kathleen Norris, which will give you my views on the matter. Of course there are base and selfish men, just as there are, although I believe in smaller numbers, base and selfish women. Man and woman alike should profit by the teachings in such a story as this of mother. Sincerely yours, Theodore Roosevelt. May twenty-first, nineteen thirteen. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. My dear sir, your letter came as a surprise, for I wasn't expecting an answer. The next day the book came, and I thank you for your ready sympathy and understanding. I feel as though you and Mrs. Roosevelt would think I was hardly loyal to my husband and children, but knowing of no other way to bring the idea which was so strong in my mind to your notice, I told my personal story. If it will in a small measure be the means of helping someone else by molding public opinion through you, I shall be content. You have helped me more than you know. Just having you interested is as good as a tonic, and braces me up till I feel as though I shall refuse to be laid on the shelf. To think that you'd bother to send me a book. I shall always treasure it both for the text of the book and the sender. I read it with absorbing interest. The mother was so splendid, she was ideal. The situations are so startlingly real, just like what happens here every day with variations. Blank. A narrative of facts is often more convincing than a homily, and these two letters of my correspondent carry their own lesson. Paranthetically, let me remark that whenever a man thinks that he has outgrown the woman who is his mate, he will do well to consider whether his growth has not been downward instead of upward, whether the facts are not merely that he has fallen away from his wife's standard of refinement and of duty. CHAPTER VI. THE NEW YORK POLICE, PART I. In the spring of 1895 I was appointed by Mayor Strong, police commissioner, and I served as president of the Police Commission of New York for the two following years. Mayor Strong had been elected mayor the preceding fall, when the general anti-democratic wave of that year coincided with one of the city's occasional insurrections of virtue and consequent turning out of tamony from municipal control. He had been elected on a nonpartisan ticket, usually, although not always, the right kind of ticket in municipal affairs, provided it represents not a bargain among factions, but genuine nonpartisanship with the genuine purpose to get the right men in control of the city government on a platform which deals with the needs of the average men and women, the men and women who work hard and who too often live hard. I was appointed with the distinct understanding that I was to administer the police department with entire disregard of partisan politics, and only from the standpoint of a good citizen interested in promoting the welfare of all good citizens. My task, therefore, was really simple. Mayor Strong had already offered me the street cleaning department. For this work I did not feel that I had any special fitness. I resolutely refused to accept the position, and the mayor ultimately got a far better man for his purpose in Colonel George F. Warring. The work of the police department, however, was in my line, and I was glad to undertake it. The man who was closest to me throughout my two years in the police department was Jacob Reis. By this time, as I have said, I was getting our social, industrial, and political needs into pretty fair perspective. I was still ignorant of the extent to which big men of great wealth played a mischievous part in our industrial and social life, but I was well awake to the need of making ours in good faith both an economic and an industrial as well as a political democracy. I already knew Jake Reis, because his book How the Other Half Lives had been to me both an enlightenment and an inspiration for which I felt I could never be too grateful. Soon after it was written I had called at his office to tell him how deeply impressed I was by the book, and that I wished to help him in any practical way to try to make things a little better. I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds, of speech that does not result in action. In other words, I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching what can be practiced and then in practicing it. Jake Reis had drawn an indictment of the things that were wrong, pitifully and dreadfully wrong, with the tenement homes and the tenement lives of our wage workers. In his book he had pointed out how the city government, and especially those connected with the Department of Police and Health, could aid in remedying some of the wrongs. As president of the police board I was also a member of the health board. In both positions I felt that with Jacob Reis's guidance I would be able to put a goodly number of his principles into actual effect. He and I looked at life and its problems from substantially the same standpoint. Our ideals and principles and purposes, and our beliefs as to the methods necessary to realize them, were like. After the election in 1894 I had written him a letter which ran in part as follows. It is very important to the city to have a businessman's mayor, and it is more important to have a working man's mayor. And I want Mr. Strong to be that also. It is an excellent thing to have rapid transit, but it is a good deal more important, if you look at matters with a proper perspective, to have ample playgrounds in the poorer quarters of the city, and to take the children off the streets so as to prevent them growing up toughs. In the same way it is an admirable thing to have clean streets. Indeed it is an essential thing to have them, but it would be a better thing to have our schools large enough to give ample accommodation to all who should be pupils, and to provide them with proper playgrounds. And I added, while expressing my regret that I had not been able to accept the street-cleaning commissionership, that I would have been delighted to smash up the corrupt contractors, and put the street-cleaning force absolutely out of the domain of politics. This was nineteen years ago, but it makes a pretty good platform in municipal politics even today. Smash corruption, take the municipal service out of the domain of politics, insist upon having a mayor who shall be a working man's mayor even more than a business man's mayor, and devote all the attention possible to the welfare of the children. Therefore as I viewed it there were two sides to the work. First the actual handling of the police department. Second using my position to help in making the city a better place in which to live and work, for those to whom the conditions of life and labor were the hardest. The two problems were closely connected, for one thing never to be forgotten in striving to better the conditions of the New York police force is the connection between the standards of morals and behavior in that force, and the general standard of morals and behavior in the city at large. The form of government of the police department at that time was such as to make it a matter of extreme difficulty to get good results. It represented that device of old school American political thought. The desire to establish checks and balances so elaborate that no man shall have power enough to do anything very bad. In practice this always means that no man has power enough to do anything good, and that what is bad is done anyhow. In most positions the division of powers theory works unmitigated mischief. The only way to get good service is to give somebody power to render it, facing the fact that power which will enable a man to do a job well will also necessarily enable him to do it ill if he is the wrong kind of man. What is normally needed is the concentration in the hands of one man, or a very small body of men, of ample power to enable him or them to do the work that is necessary, and then the devising of means to hold these men fully responsible for the exercise of that power by the people. This of course means that if the people are willing to see power misused it will be misused. But it also means that, as we hold, the people are fit for self-government. If in other words our talk and our institutions are not shams we will get good government. I do not contend that my theory will automatically bring good government. I do contend that it will enable us to get as good government as we deserve and that the other way will not. The then government of the police department was so devised as to render it most difficult to accomplish anything good, while the field for intrigue and conspiracy was limitless. There were four commissioners, two supposed to belong to one party and two to the other, although as a matter of fact they never divided on party lines. There was a chief, appointed by the commissioners, but whom they could not remove without a regular trial, subject to review by the courts of law. This chief and any one commissioner had power to hold up most of the acts of the other three commissioners. It was made easy for the four commissioners to come to a deadlock among themselves, and if this danger was avoided it was easy for one commissioner, by intriguing with the chief, to bring the other three to a stand still. The commissioners were appointed by the mayor, but he could not remove them without the consent of the governor, who was usually politically opposed to him. In the same way the commissioners could appoint the patrolman, but they could not remove them, save after a trial which went up for review to the courts. As was inevitable under our system of law procedure, this meant that the action of the court was apt to be determined by legal technicalities. It was possible to dismiss a man from the service for quite insufficient reasons, and to provide against the reversal of the sentence if the technicalities of procedure were observed. But the worst criminals were apt to be adroit men, against whom it was impossible to get legal evidence which a court could properly consider in a criminal trial, and the mood of the court might be to treat the case as if it were a criminal trial. Although it was easy to get evidence which would render it not merely justifiable but necessary for a man to remove them from his private employ, and surely the public should be as well treated as a private employer. Accordingly most of the worst men put out were reinstated by the courts, and when the mayor attempted to remove one of my colleagues who made it his business to try to nullify the work done by the rest of us, the governor sided with the recalcitrant commissioner and refused to permit his removal. Nevertheless an astounding quantity of work was done in reforming the force. We had a good deal of power, anyhow, we exercised it to the full, and we accomplished some things by assuming the appearance of power which we did not really possess. The first fight I made was to keep politics absolutely out of the force, and not only politics, but every kind of improper favoritism. Doubtless in making thousands of appointments and hundreds of promotions there were men who contrived to use influence of which I was ignorant. But these cases must have been few and far between. As far as was humanly possible the appointments and promotions were made without regard to any question except the fitness of the man and the needs of the service. As civil service commissioner I had been instructing heads of departments and bureaus how to get men appointed without regard to politics, and assuring them that by following our methods they would obtain first class results. As police commissioner I was able practically to apply my own teachings. The appointments to the police force were made as I have described in the last chapter. We paid not the slightest attention to a man's politics or creed, or where he was born, so long as he was an American citizen, and on average we obtained far and away the best men that had ever come into the police department. It was of course very difficult at first to convince both the politicians and the people that we really meant what we said, and that everyone really would have a fair trial. There had been in previous years the most widespread and gross corruption in connection with every activity in the police department, and there had been a regular tariff for appointments and promotions. Many powerful politicians and many corrupt outsiders believed that in some way or other it would still be possible to secure appointments by corrupt and improper methods, and many good citizens felt the same conviction. I endeavored to remove the impression from the minds of both sets of people by giving the widest publicity to what we were doing and how we were doing it, by making the whole process open and aboveboard, and by making it evident that we would probe to the bottom every charge of corruption. For instance, I received visits at one time from a Catholic priest and at another time from a Methodist clergyman who had parishioners who wished to enter the police force but who did not believe they could get in saved by the payment of money or through political pressure. The priest was running a temperance lyceum in connection with his church, and he wished to know if there would be a chance for some of the young men who belonged to that lyceum. The Methodist clergyman came from a little patch of old Native America which by a recent extension had been taken within the limits of the huge polyglot, pleasure-loving city. His was a small church, most of the members being shipwrights, mechanics, and sailor-men from the local coasters. In each case I assured my visitor that we wanted on the force men of the exact type which he said he could furnish. I also told him that I was as anxious as he was to find out if there was any improper work being done in connection with the examinations, and that I would like him to get four or five of his men to take the examinations without letting me know their names. Then, whether the men failed or succeeded, he and I would take their papers and follow them through every stage so that we could tell at once whether they had been improperly favored or improperly discriminated against. This was accordingly done, and in each case my visitor turned up a few weeks later his face wreathed in smiles to say that his candidates had passed and that everything was evidently all straight. During my two years as President of the Commission, I think I appointed a dozen or fifteen members of that little Methodist congregation, and certainly twice that number of men from the temperance lyceum of the Catholic Church in question. They were all men of the very type I most wished to see on the force. Men of strong physique and resolute temper, sober, self-respecting, self-reliant, with a strong wish to improve themselves. Occasionally I would myself pick out a man and tell him to take the examination. Thus one evening I went down to speak in the Bowery at the Young Men's Institute, a branch of the Young Men's Christian Association, at the request of Mr. Cleveland H. Dodge. While there he told me he wished to show me a young Jew who had recently, by an exhibition of market pluck and bodily prowess, saved some women and children from a burning building. The young Jew whose name was Otto Raphael was brought up to see me, a powerful fellow with a good-humored, intelligent face. I asked him about his education and told him to try the examination. He did, passed, was appointed, and made an admirable officer, and he and all his family, wherever they may dwell, have been close friends of mine ever since. Otto Raphael was a genuine East Sider. He and I were both straight New York City to use the vernacular of our native city. To show our community of feeling and our grasp of the facts of life, I may mention that we were almost the only men in the police department who picked Fitzsimmons as a winner against Corbett. Otto's parents had come over from Russia, and not only in social standing but in pay, a policeman's position meant everything to him. It enabled Otto to educate his little brothers and sisters who had been born in this country, and to bring over from Russia two or three kinsfolk who had perforce been left behind. Rather curiously it was by no means as easy to keep politics and corruption out of the promotions as out of the entrance examinations. This was because I could take complete charge of the entrance examinations myself, and moreover they were largely automatic. In promotions, on the other hand, the prime element was the record and capacity of the officer, and for this we had largely to lie upon the judgments of the man's immediate superiors. This doubtless meant that in certain cases that judgment was given for improper reasons. However, there were cases where I could act on personal knowledge. One thing that we did was to endeavor to recognize gallantry. We did not have to work a revolution in the forest as to courage in the way that we had to work a revolution in honesty. They had always been brave in dealing with riotous and violent criminals, but they had gradually become very corrupt. Our great work, therefore, was the stamping out of dishonesty, and this work we did thoroughly, so far as the ridiculous bipartisan law under which the department was administered would permit. But we were anxious that, while stamping out what was evil in the force, we should keep and improve what was good. While warring on dishonesty we made every effort to increase efficiency. It has unfortunately been shown by sad experience that at times a police organization which is free from the taint of corruption may yet show itself weak in some great crisis or unable to deal with the more dangerous kinds of criminals. This we were determined to prevent. Our efforts were crowned with entire success. The improvement in the efficiency of the force went hand in hand with the improvement in its honesty. The men in uniform and the men in plain clothes, the detectives, did better work than ever before. The aggregate of crimes where punishment followed the commission of the crime increased, while the aggregate of crimes where the criminal escaped punishment decreased. Every discredited politician, every sensational newspaper, and every timid fool who could be scared by clamor was against us. All three classes strove by every means in their power to show that in making the force honest we had impaired its efficiency, and by their utterances they tended to bring about the very condition of things against which they professed to protest. But we went steadily along the path we had marked out. The fight was hard, and there was plenty of worry and anxiety, but we won. I was appointed in May, 1895. In February, 1897, three months before I resigned to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the judge who charged the grand jury of New York County was able to congratulate them on the phenomenal decrease in crime, especially of the violent sort. This decrease was steady during the two years. The police, after the reform policy was thoroughly tried, proved more successful than ever in protecting life and property, and in putting down crime and criminal vise. The part played by the recognition and reward of actual personal prowess among the members of the police force in producing the state of affairs was appreciable, though there were many other factors that combined to bring about the betterment. The immense improvement in discipline by punishing all offenders without mercy, no matter how great their political or personal influence, the resolute warfare against every kind of criminal who had hitherto been able, corruptly, to purchase protection, the prompt recognition of ability, even where it was entirely unconnected with personal prowess, all these were elements which had enormous weight in producing the change. Mere courage and daring, and the rewarding of courage and daring, cannot supply the lack of discipline of ability, of honesty. But they are a vital consequence nevertheless. No police force is worth anything if its members are not intelligent and honest, but neither is it worth anything unless its members are brave, hearty, and well disciplined. We showed recognition of daring and of personal prowess in two ways. First, by awarding a medal or a certificate in remembrance of the deed, and second, by giving it weight in making any promotion, especially to the lower grades. In the higher grades, in all promotions above that of sergeant, for instance, resolute and daring courage cannot normally be considered as a factor of determining weight in making promotions. Rather, it is a quality the lack of which unfits a man per promotion. For the higher places we must assume the existence of such a quality in any fit candidate, and must make the promotion with a view to the man's energy, executive capacity, and power of command. In the lower grades, however, marked gallantry should always be taken into account in deciding among different candidates for any given place. During our two-year service, we found it necessary over a hundred times to single out men for special mention because of some feat of heroism. The heroism usually took one of four forms, saving somebody from drowning, saving somebody from a burning building, stopping a runaway team, or arresting some violent lawbreaker under exceptional circumstances. To illustrate our method of action, I will take two of the first promotions made after I became commissioner. One case was that of an old fellow, a veteran of the Civil War, who was, at the time, a roundsman. I happened to notice one day that he had saved a woman from drowning, and had him summoned, so that I might look into the matter. The old fellow brought up his record before me, and showed not a little nervousness and agitation, for it appeared that he had grown gray in the service, and had performed feat after feat of heroism, but had no political backing of any account. No heed had ever been paid him. He was one of the quiet men who attend solely to duty, and although a grand army man, he had never sought to use influence of any kind. Now, at last, he thought there was a chance for him. He had been twenty-two years on the force, and during that time he had saved some twenty-five persons from death by drowning, varying the performance two or three times by saving persons from burning buildings. Twice Congress had passed laws especially to empower the then Secretary of the Treasurer, John Sherman, to give him a medal for distinguished gallantry and saving life. The life-saving society had also given him its medal, and so had the police department. There was not a complaint in all his record against him for any infraction of duty, and he was sober and trustworthy. He was entitled to his promotion, and he got it there and then. It may be worth mentioning that he kept on saving life after he was given his sergeancy. On October 21st, 1896, he again rescued a man from drowning. It was at night, nobody else was in the neighborhood, and the dock from which he jumped was in absolute darkness, and he was ten minutes in the water, which was very cold. He was fifty-five years old when he saved this man. It was the twenty-ninth person whose life he had saved during his twenty-three year service in the department. The other man was a patrolman, whom we promoted to roundsmen for activity in catching a burglar under rather peculiar circumstances. I happen to note his getting a burglar one week. Apparently he had fallen into the habit, for he got another next week. In the latter case the burglar escaped from the house soon after midnight and ran away toward Park Avenue with the policeman in hot chase. The New York Central Railroad runs under Park Avenue, and there is a secession of openings in the top of the tunnel. Finding that the policeman was gaining on him, the burglar took a desperate chance and leaped down one of these openings at the risk of breaking his neck. Now the burglar was running for his liberty, and it was the part of wisdom for him to imperil life or limb, but the policeman was merely doing his duty, and nobody could have blamed him for not taking the jump. However, he jumped, and in this particular case the hand of the Lord was heavy upon the unrighteous. The burglar had the breath knocked out of him, and the cop didn't. When his victim could walk the officer trotted him around to the station-house, and a week after I had the officer up and promoted him, for he was sober, trustworthy, and strictly attentive to duty. CHAPTER VI. Now I think that any decent man of reasonable intelligence will agree that we were quite right in promoting men in cases like these, and quite right in excluding politics from promotions. Yet it was because of our consistency acting in this manner, resolutely warring on dishonesty and on that peculiar form of baseness which masquerades as practical politics, and steadily refusing to pay heed to any consideration except the good of the service in the city, and the merits of the men themselves, that we drew down upon our heads the bitter and malignant animosity of the bread and butter spoils politicians. They secured the repeal of the civil service law by the state legislature. They attempted, and almost succeeded, in the effort to legislate us out of office. They joined with the base or portion of the sensational press in every species of foul, indecent falsehood and slander as to what we were doing. They attempted to seduce or frighten us by every species of intrigue and conjulery, a promise of political reward and threat of political punishment. They failed in their purpose. I believe in political organizations, and I believe in practical politics. If a man is not practical he is of no use anywhere. But when politicians treat practical politics as foul politics, and when they turn what ought to be a necessary and useful political organization into a machine run by professional spoilsmen of low morality in their own interest, then it is time to drive the politician from public office, and either to mend or destroy the machine, according as the necessity may determine. We promoted to Roundsman a patrolman, with an already excellent record for gallantry shown in a fray which resulted in the death of his antagonist. He was after a gang of Tufts who had just waylaid, robbed, and beaten a man. They scattered, and he pursued the ringleader. Running hard he gained on his man, whereupon the latter suddenly turned and fired, full in his face. The officer already had his revolver drawn, and the two shots rang out almost together. The policeman was within a fraction of death, for the bullet from his opponent's pistol went through his helmet and just broke the skin of his head. His own aim was truer, and the man he was after fell dead, shot through the heart. I may explain that I have not the slightest sympathy with any policy which tends to put the policeman at the mercy of a Tuft, or which deprives him of efficient weapons. While police commissioner we punished any brutality by the police with such immediate severity that all cases of brutality practically came to an end. No decent citizen had anything to fear from the police during the two years of my service. But we consistently encouraged the police to prove that the violent criminal who endeavored to molest them or to resist arrest, or to interfere with them in the discharge of their duty, was himself in grave jeopardy, and we had every gang broken up and the members punished with whatever severity was necessary. Of course where possible the officer merely crippled the criminal who was violent. One of the things that we did while in office was to train the men in the use of the patrol. A school of pistol practice was established and the marksmanship of the force was wonderfully improved. The man in charge of the school was a roundsman, petty, whom we promoted to sergeant. He was one of the champion revolver shots of the country and could hit just about where he aimed. Twice he was forced to fire at criminals who resisted arrest, and in each case he hit his man in the arm or leg, simply stopping him without danger to his life. In May 1896 a number of burglaries occurred far uptown in the neighborhood of 156th Street and Union Avenue. Two officers were sent out each night to patrol the streets in plain clothes. About two o'clock on the morning of May 8 they caught a glimpse of two men loitering about a large corner house and determined to make them explain their actions. In order to cut off their escape one officer went down one street and one the other. The first officer, whose name was Ryan, found the two men at the gateway of the side entrance of the house and hailed to know what they were doing. Without answering they turned and ran toward Prospect Avenue with Ryan in close pursuit. After running about one hundred feet one of them turned and fired three shots at Ryan but failed to hit him. The two then separated and the man who had done the shooting escaped. The other man, whose name proved to be O'Connor, again took to his heels, with Ryan still after him. They turned the corner and met the other officer whose name was Reed, running as hard as he could toward the shooting. When O'Connor saw himself cut off by Reed he fired at his new foe, the bullet cutting Reed's overcoat on the left shoulder. Reed promptly fired him return, his bullet going into O'Connor's neck and causing him to turn a complete somersault. The two officers then cared for their prisoner until the ambulance arrived when he was taken to the hospital and pronounced mortally wounded. His companion was afterwards caught and they turned out to be the very burglars for whom Reed and Ryan had been on the lookout. In December 1896 one of our officers was shot. A row occurred in a restaurant which ended in two young tufts drawing their revolvers and literally running a muck, shooting two or three men. A policeman, attracted by the noise, ran up and seized one of them, whereupon the other shot him in the mouth, wounding him badly. Nevertheless the officer kept his prisoner and carried him to the station house. The tuft who had done the shooting ran out and was seized by another officer. The tuft fired at him, the bullet passing through the officer's overcoat, but he was promptly knocked down, disarmed and brought to the station house. In this case neither policeman used his revolver and each brought in his man, although the latter was armed and resisted to rest, one of the officers taking in his prisoner after having been himself severely wounded. A lamentable feature of the case was that this same officer was a man who, though capable of great gallantry, was also given to shirking his work, and we were finally obliged to dismiss him from the force after passing over two or three glaring with steeds in view of his record for courage. We promoted another man on account of finding out accidentally that he had performed a notable feat, which he had for born even to mention, so that his name never came out on the roles of honor. Late at night, while patrolling a lonely part of his post, he came upon three young tufts who had turned Highwomen and were robbing a peddler. He ran at once with his night-stick, whereupon the tufts showed fight, and one of them struck at him with a bludgeon, breaking his left hand. The officer, however, made such good use of his night-stick that he knocked down two of his assailants, whereupon the third ran away, and he brought both of his prisoners to the station house. Then he went round to the hospital, had his broken hand set in plaster, and actually reported for duty at the next tour, without losing one hour. He was a quiet fellow, with a record free from complaints, and we made him a roundsman. The mounted squad have, of course, many opportunities to distinguish themselves in stopping runaways. In May, 1895, a mounted policeman named Hire succeeded in stopping a runaway at King's Bridge under rather noteworthy circumstances. Two men were driving in a buggy when the horse stumbled, and in recovering himself broke the head stall, so that the bridle fell off. The horse was a spirited trotter, and at once ran away at full speed. Hire saw the occurrence and followed at a run. When he got alongside the runaway he seized him by the forelock, guided him dexterously over of the bridge, prevented him from running into the numerous wagons that were on the road, and finally forced him up a hill and into a wagon shed. Three months later this same officer saved him from drowning. The members of the Bicycle Squad, which was established shortly after we took office, soon grew to show not only extraordinary proficiency on the wheel, but extraordinary daring. They frequently stopped runaways, wheeling alongside of them, and grasping the horses while going at full speed. And what was even more remarkable, they managed not only to overtake, but to jump onto the vehicle and capture, on two or three different occasions, men who were guilty of reckless driving, and who fought violently in resisting arrest. They were picked men, being young and active, and any feat of daring which could be accomplished on the wheel they were certain to accomplish. Three of the best riders of the Bicycle Squad, whose names and records happened to occur to me, were men of the three ethnic strains most strongly represented in New York City police force, being respectively of Native American, German, and Irish parentage. The German was a man of enormous power, and he was able to stop each of the many runaways he tackled without losing his wheel. Choosing his time, he would get alongside the horse and seize the bit in his left hand, keeping his right on the crossbar of the wheel. By degrees he then got the animal under control. He never failed to stop it, and he never lost his wheel. He also never failed to overtake any scorcher, although many of these were professional riders who deliberately violated the law to see if they could not get away from him, for the wheel-men soon get to know the officers whose beats they crossed. The Yankee, though a tall, powerful man and a very good rider, scarcely came up to the German in either respect. He possessed exceptional ability, however, as well as exceptional nerve and coolness, and he also won his promotion. He stopped about as many runaways, but when the horse was really panic-stricken he usually had to turn his wheel loose, getting a firm grip on the horse's reins and kicking his wheel so that it would fall out of the way of injury from the wagon. On one occasion he had a fight with a drunken and reckless driver who was urging to top speed a spirited horse. He first got hold of the horse, whereupon the driver lashed both him and the beast, and the animal, already mad with terror, could not be stopped. The officer had of course kicked away his wheel at the beginning, and after being dragged along for some distance he let go the beast and made a grab at the wagon. The driver hit him with his whip, but he managed to get in, and after a vigorous tussle overcame his man and disposed of him by getting him down and sitting on him. This left his hands free for the reins. By degrees he got the horse under control and drove the wagon round to the station house, still sitting on his victim. I'd bounced up and down on him to keep him quiet when he turned ugly, he remarked to me parenthetically. Having disposed of the wagon he took the man round to the court, and on the way the prisoner suddenly sprang on him and tried to throttle him. Convinced at last that patience had ceased to be a virtue, he quieted his assailant with a smash on the head that took all the fight out of him until he was brought before the judge and fined. Like the other bicycle cops, this officer made a number of arrests of criminals, such as thieves, high women and the like, in addition to his natural prey, scorchers, runaway, and reckless drivers. The third member of the trio, a tall, sinewy man with flaming red hair, which rather added to the terror he inspired in evil doers, was usually stationed in a tough part of the city, where there was a tendency to crimes of violence and, incidentally, an occasional desire to harass wheelmen. The officer was as good off his wheel as on it, and he was speedily established perfect order on his beat, being always willing to take chances in getting his man. He was no respecter of persons, and when it became his duty to arrest a wealthy man for persistently refusing to have his carriage lamp slided after a nightfall, he brought him in with the same indifference that he displayed in arresting a street corner tough who had thrown a brick at a wheelman. Occasionally a policeman would perform work which ordinarily comes within the domain of a fireman. In November, 1896, an officer who had previously saved a man from death by drowning added to his record by saving five persons from burning. He was, at the time, asleep when he was roused by a fire in the house a few doors away. Running over the roofs of the adjoining houses until he reached the burning building, he found that on the fourth floor the flames had cut off all exit from an apartment in which there were four women, two of them over fifty, and one of the others with a six-month-old baby. The officer ran down to the adjoining house, broke open the door of the apartment on the same floor, the fourth, and crept out on the coping, less than three inches wide, that ran from one house to the other. Being a large and very powerful and active man, he managed to keep hold of the casing of the window with one hand and with the other to reach to the window of the apartment where the women and children were. The fireman appeared and stretched a net underneath. The crowd that was looking on suddenly became motionless and silent. Then, one by one, he drew the women out of their window, and holding them tight against the wall, passed them into the other window. The exertion in such an attitude was great, and he strained himself badly, but he possessed a practical mind, and as soon as the women were saved he began a prompt investigation of the cause of the fire and arrested two men whose carelessness, as was afterwards proved, caused it. Then and now a man, though a brave man, proved to be a slack or stupid or vicious, and we could make nothing out of him, but hardyhood and courage were qualities upon which we insisted and which we rewarded. Whenever I see the police force attacked and vilified, I always remember my association with it. The cases I have given, above, are nearly instances chosen almost at random among hundreds of others. Men such as those I have mentioned have the right stuff in them. If they go wrong, the trouble is with the system, and therefore with us, the citizens, for permitting the system to go unchanged. The conditions of New York life are such as to make the police problem therein more difficult than in any other of the world's great capitals. I am often asked if policemen are honest. I believe that the great majority of them want to be honest, and will be honest whenever they are given the chance. The New York police force is a body thoroughly representative of the great city itself. As I have said above, the predominant ethnic strains in it are, first, the men of Irish birth or parentage, and following these, the Native Americans, usually from the country districts, and the men of German birth or parentage. There are also Jews, Scandinavians, Italians, Slavs, and men of other nationalities. All soon become welded into one body. They are physically a fine lot. Moreover, their instincts are right. They are game. They are alert and self-reliant. They prefer to act squarely if they are allowed to so act. All that they need is to be given the chance to prove themselves honest, brave, and self-respecting. The lot present is much better than an hour day, so far as governing the force is concerned. There is now a single commissioner, and the mayor has complete power over him. The mayor, through his commissioner, now has power to keep the police force on a good level of conduct, if with resolution and common sense he insists on absolute honesty within the force, and at the same time, heartily supports it against the criminal classes. To weaken the force in its dealings with gangs and tufts, and criminals generally, is as damaging as to permit dishonesty, and moreover, works towards dishonesty. But while under the present law, very much improvement can be worked. There is a need of change of the law which will make the police commissioner a permanent, nonpartisan official, holding office so long as he proves thoroughly fit for the job, completely independent of the politicians and privileged interests, and with complete power over the force. This means that there must be the right law and the right public opinion back of the law. The many-sided ethnic character of the force now and then gives rise to, or affords opportunity for, queer happenings. Occasionally it enables one to meet emergencies in the best possible fashion. While I was police commissioner, an anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Alvert, came over to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews. Many of the New York Jews were much excited and asked me to prevent him from speaking and not to give him police protection. This I told him was impossible, and if possible would have been undesirable because it would have made him martyr. The proper thing to do was to make him ridiculous. Accordingly I detailed for his protection a Jew sergeant and a score or two of Jewish policemen. He made his harangue against the Jews under the active protection of some forty policemen, every one of them a Jew. It was the most effective possible answer, and incidentally it was an object lesson to our people, whose greatest need is to learn that there must be no division by class hatred whether this hatred be that of creed against creed, nationality against nationality, section against section, or men of one social or industrial condition, against men of another social and industrial condition. We must ever judge each individual on his own conduct and merits, and not on his membership in any class, whether that class be based on theological, social, or industrial considerations. Among my political opponents when I was police commissioner was the head of a very influential local democratic organization. He was a state senator usually known as Big Tim Sullivan. Big Tim represented the morals of another era, that is, his principles and actions were very much those of a Norman noble in the years immediately succeeding the battle of Hastings. This will seem flattery only to those who are not acquainted with the real histories and antecedents of the Norman nobles of the epic in question. His application of these eleventh century theories to our nineteenth-century municipal democratic conditions brought him into sharp contact with me, and with one of my right-hand men of the department, Inspector John McCullough. Under the old dispensation this would have meant that his friends and kinsfolk were under the ban. Now it happened that in the department at that time there was a nephew or cousin of his, Jerry D. Sullivan. I found that Jerry was an uncommonly good man, a conscientious, capable officer, and I promoted him. I do not know whether Jerry or Jerry's cousin, Senator Sullivan, was more astonished. The senator called upon me to express what I am sure was a very genuine feeling of appreciation. Poor Jerry died, I think of consumption, a year or two after I left the department. He was promoted again after I left, and then he showed that he possessed the rare quality of gratitude, for he sent me a telegram dated January 15, 1898, running as follows. Was made a sergeant today. I thank you for all in my first advancement, and in a letter he said to me, in the future, as in the past, I will endeavor at all times to perform my duty honestly and fearlessly, and never cause you to feel that you were mistaken in me, so that you will be justly proud of my record. The senator, though politically opposed to me, always kept a feeling of friendship for me after this incident. He served in Congress while I was president. The police can be used to help all kinds of good purposes. While I was police commissioner, much difficulty had been encountered in locating illegal and fraudulent practitioners of medicine. Dr. Maurice Louis called on me, with a letter from James Russell Parsons, the Secretary of the Board of Regents at Albany, and asked me if I could not help. After questioning him, I found that the local authorities were eager to prosecute these men, but could not locate them, and I made up my mind I would try my hand at it. Accordingly, a sealed order was sent to the commanding officer of each police precinct in New York, not to be opened until just before the morning roll call, previous to the police squad going on duty. This order required that, immediately upon reaching post, each patrolman should go over his beat and enter upon a sheet of paper provided for that purpose the full name and address of every doctor signed there appearing. Immediately upon securing this information, the patrolman was instructed to return the sheet to the officer in charge of the precinct. The latter, in turn, was instructed to collect in place in one large envelope, and to return police headquarters all the data thus received. As a result of this procedure, within two hours the prosecuting officials of the city of New York were in possession of the name and address of every person in New York who announced himself as a physician, and scores of pretended physicians were brought to book or driven from the city. One of the perennially serious and difficult problems, and one of the chief reasons for police blackmail and corruption, is to be found in the excise situation in New York. When I was police commissioner, New York was a city with twelve or fifteen thousand saloons, with a state law which said that they should be closed on Sundays, and with a local sentiment which put a premium on violating the law by making Sunday the most profitable day in the week to the saloon keeper who was willing to take chances. It was this willingness to take chances that furnished to the corrupt politician and the corrupt police officer their opportunities. There was, in New York City, a strong sentiment in favour of honesty in politics. There was also a strong sentiment in favour of opening the saloons on Sundays, and finally there was a strong sentiment in favour of keeping the saloons closed on Sunday. Unfortunately, many of the men who favored honest government nevertheless preferred keeping the saloons open to having honest government, and many others who among the men who favored honest government put it second to keeping the saloons closed. Moreover, among the men who wished the law obeyed in the saloons closed, there were plenty who objected strongly to every step necessary to accomplish the result, although they also insisted that the result should be accomplished.