able to use his mind quickly and well, he is either helpless, or
soon placed in a position where he seems to have been
dishonorable. For, of course the first method which a crooked man
uses to destroy his honest opponent, is to try to make him look
crooked, too. Often during his life Roosevelt insisted upon the
fact that a man in public life must not only be honest, but that
he must have a back-bone and a good head into the bargain.

Nothing but a sense of public duty, nothing but a desire to help
the cause of better government, could have made a man take the
Police Commissionership in 1895. Mayor Strong, on a Reform ticket,
had beaten Tammany Hall. He wanted an able and energetic man and
so sent for Roosevelt. The condition of the Police Department
sounds more like a chapter from a dime novel gone mad, than from
any real state of things which could exist in a modern city. Yet
it did exist.

The police were supposed to protect the city against crime. What
they really did was to stop some of the crime--when the criminal
had no "pull"--and to protect the rest of it. The criminal handed
over a certain amount of his plunder to the police, and they let
him go on with his crime. More than that, they saw that no one
bothered him. There was a regular scale of prices for things
varying all the way from serious crime down to small offenses. It
cost more to be a highway robber, burglar, gun-man or murderer,
for instance, than merely to keep a saloon open after the legal
time for closing. A man had to pay more for running a big
gambling-house, than simply for blocking the side-walk with
rubbish and ash-cans.