the Civil Service Law, which under his predecessor had been
repealed, and put through a mass of labor legislation for the
betterment of conditions under which the workers carried on their
daily lives. This legislation included laws to increase the
number of factory inspectors, to create a tenement-house
commission, to regulate sweatshop labor, to make the eight-hour
and prevailing rate of wages law effective, to compel railways to
equip freight trains with air brakes, to regulate the working
hours of women, to protect women and children from dangerous
machinery, to enforce good scaffolding provisions for workmen on
buildings, to provide seats for the use of waitresses in hotels
and restaurants, to reduce the hours of labor for drug-store
clerks, to provide for the registration of laborers for municipal
employment. He worked hard to secure an employers' liability law,
but the time for this was not yet come.

Many of these reforms are now matters of course that no employer
would think of attempting to eliminate. But they were new ideas
then; and it took vision and courage to fight for them.

Roosevelt would have been glad to be elected Governor for a
second term. But destiny, working through curious instruments,
would not have it so. He left behind him in the Empire State, not
only a splendid record of concrete achievement but something more
than that. Jacob Riis has told how, some time after, an old State
official at Albany, who had seen many Governors come and go,
revealed this intangible something. Mr. Riis had said to him that
he did not care much for Albany since Roosevelt had gone, and his
friend replied: "Yes, we think so, many of us. The place seemed
dreary when he was gone. But I know now that he left something