defacing the monuments of the wisdom of the founders of the government,
that we were destroying that distinction between legislative and
executive power which was the bulwark of our liberties, and that we were
violent and unscrupulous radicals with no reverence for the past.

Of course the investigations, disclosures, and proceedings of the
investigating committee of which I was chairman brought me into
bitter personal conflict with very powerful financiers, very powerful
politicians, and with certain newspapers which these financiers and
politicians controlled. A number of able and unscrupulous men were
fighting, some for their financial lives, and others to keep out of
unpleasantly close neighborhood to State's prison. This meant that there
were blows to be taken as well as given. In such political struggles,
those who went in for the kind of thing that I did speedily excited
animosities among strong and cunning men who would stop at little to
gratify their animosity. Any man engaged in this particular type of
militant and practical reform movement was soon made to feel that he had
better not undertake to push matters home unless his own character was
unassailable. On one of the investigating committees on which I served
there was a countryman, a very able man, who, when he reached New York
City, felt as certain Americans do when they go to Paris--that the moral
restraints of his native place no longer applied. With all his ability,
he was not shrewd enough to realize that the Police Department was
having him as well as the rest of us carefully shadowed. He was caught
red-handed by a plain-clothes man doing what he had no business to do;
and from that time on he dared not act save as those who held his secret
permitted him to act. Thenceforth those officials who stood behind the
Police Department had one man on the committee on whom they could count.
I never saw terror more ghastly on a strong man's face than on the face
of this man on one or two occasions when he feared that events in the