together. Cleveland was forty-four and Roosevelt was twenty-three.

One of the most important events while he was in the Assembly
arose from a bill to regulate the manufacture of cigars in New
York City. He had found that cigars were often made under the most
unhealthy surroundings in the single living room of a family in a
tenement. In one house which he investigated himself, there were
two families, and a boarder, all living in one room, while one or
more of the men carried on the manufacture of cigars in the same
room. Everything about the place was filthy, and both for the
health of the families and of the possible users of the cigars, it
was necessary to have this state of affairs ended.

He advocated a bill which passed, and was signed by Governor
Cleveland, forbidding such manufacture. So far, so good; but there
were persons who found that the law was against their interests.
They succeeded in getting the Court of Appeals to set the law
aside, and in their decision the judges said the law was an
assault upon the "hallowed associations" of the home!

This made Roosevelt wake to the fact that courts were not always
the best judges of the living conditions of classes of people with
whom they had no contact They knew the law; they did not know
life. The decision blocked tenement house reform in New York for
twenty years, and was one more item in Roosevelt's political
education.