the bar-tenders sold with impunity. The children, often the
little children of depraved parents, "rushed the growler";
factory hands sent the boys out regularly to fetch their bottle
or bucket of drink from the saloons. Everybody knew of these
breaches of the law, but the framers of the law had taken care to
make it very difficult to procure legal evidence of those
breaches. The public conscience was pricked a little when the
newspapers told it that one of the youths sent for liquor had
drunk so much of it that he fell into a stupor, took refuge in an
old building, and that there the rats had eaten him alive.
Whether it was before or after this horror that Chief
Commissioner Roosevelt decided to take the law into his own
hands, I do not know, but what he did was swift. The Police
engaged one of the minors, who had been in the habit of going to
the saloons, to go for another supply, and then to testify. This
summary proceeding scared the rum-dealers and, no doubt, they
guarded against being caught again. But the victims of moral dry
rot held up their hands in rebuke and one of the city judges wept
metaphorical tears of chagrin that the Police should engage in
the awful crime of enticing a youth to commit crime. The record
does not show that this judge, or any other, had ever done
anything to check the practice of selling liquor to minors, a
practice which inevitably led thousands of the youth of New York
City to become drunkards.

How do you judge Roosevelt's act? Do you admit that a little
wrong may ever be done in order to secure a great right?
Roosevelt held, in such cases, that the wrong is only technical,
or a blind set up by the wicked to shield themselves. The danger
of allowing each person to play with the law, as with a toy, is