The only kinds of courage and honesty which are permanently useful to
good institutions anywhere are those shown by men who decide all cases
with impartial justice on grounds of conduct and not on grounds of
class. We found that in the long run the men who in public blatantly
insisted that labor was never wrong were the very men who in private
could not be trusted to stand for labor when it was right. We grew
heartily to distrust the reformer who never denounced wickedness unless
it was embodied in a rich man. Human nature does not change; and that
type of "reformer" is as noxious now as he ever was. The loud-mouthed
upholder of popular rights who attacks wickedness only when it is allied
with wealth, and who never publicly assails any misdeed, no matter how
flagrant, if committed nominally in the interest of labor, has either a
warped mind or a tainted soul, and should be trusted by no honest man.
It was largely the indignant and contemptuous dislike aroused in our
minds by the demagogues of this class which then prevented those of us
whose instincts at bottom were sound from going as far as we ought to
have gone along the lines of governmental control of corporations and
governmental interference on behalf of labor.

I did, however, have one exceedingly useful experience. A bill was
introduced by the Cigar-Makers' Union to prohibit the manufacture of
cigars in tenement-houses. I was appointed one of a committee of three
to investigate conditions in the tenement-houses and see if legislation
should be had. Of my two colleagues on the committee, one took no
interest in the measure and privately said he did not think it was
right, but that he had to vote for it because the labor unions were
strong in his district and he was pledged to support the bill. The
other, a sporting Tammany man who afterwards abandoned politics for the
race-track, was a very good fellow. He told me frankly that he had to be
against the bill because certain interests which were all-powerful and