and able, but without polish or special fitness; the other a college man, a graduate of how many foreign schools of learning I don't know, a gentleman of travel, of refinement. He was the man for the position, which included much contact with the outer world,—so I judged, and so did others. Roosevelt had the deciding vote. We urged our man strongly upon him. He saw the force of our arguments, and yielded, but slowly and most reluctantly. His outspoken preference was for the janitor's son, who had fought himself up to the point where he could compete. And he was right, after all. The other was a failure; he was over-educated. I was glad, for Roosevelt's sake as well as for my own, when in after years the janitor's son took his place and came to his own. One incident, which I have told before, I cannot forbear setting down here again, for without it even this fragmentary record would be too incomplete. I mean his meeting with the labor men who were having constant trouble with the police over their strikes, their pickets, etc. They made me much too proud of them, both he and they, for me ever to forget that. Roosevelt saw that the trouble was 1 in their not understanding one another, and he asked the labor leaders to meet him at Clarendon Hall to talk it over. Together we trudged through a blinding snow-storm to the meeting. This was at the beginning of things, when the town had not yet got the bearings of the man. The strike leaders thought they had to do with an ambitious politician, and they tried bluster. They would do so and so unless the police were compliant; and they watched to get him placed. They had not long to wait. Roosevelt called a halt, short and sharp. "Gentlemen!" he said, "we want to understand one another. That was my object in coming here. Remember, please, that he who counsels violence does the cause of labor the poorest service. Also, he loses his case. Understand distinctly that order will be kept. The police will keep it. Now, gentlemen!" There was a moment's amazed suspense, and then the hall rang with their cheers. They had him placed then, for they knew a man when they saw him. And he,-he went home proud and happy, for his trust in his fellow-man was justified. He said, when it was all over, that there was no call at all for any genius in the work of administering the police force, nor, indeed, for any unusual qualities, but just common sense, common honesty, energy, resolution, and readiness to learn; which was probably so. They are the qualities he brought to everything he ever put his hands to. But if he learned something in that work that helped round off the man in him, though it was not all sweetness or light, he taught us much more. His plain performance of a plain duty, the doing the right because it was the right, taught us a lesson we stood in greater need of than of any other. Roosevelt's campaign for the reform of the police force became the moral issue of the day. It swept the cobwebs out of our civic brains, and blew the dust from our eyes, so that we saw clearly where all had been confusion before: saw straight, rather. We rarely realize, in these latter days, how much of our ability to fight for good government, and our hope of winning the fight, is due to the campaign of honesty waged by Theodore Roosevelt in Mulberry Street. |