Our City Prison is equally reversed.  It was our shame; it is our pride.  The old Almshouse was a discreditable asylum for the politician who chanced to superintend it.  Today our “Relief Home” is a model for the country.  In 1906 the city was destroyed because unprotected against fire.  Today we are as safe as a city can be.  In the meantime the reduced cost of insurance pays insured citizens a high rate of interest on the cost of our high-pressure auxiliary fire system.  Our streets were once noted for their poor construction and their filthy condition.  Recently an informed visitor has pronounced them the best to be found.  We had no creditable boulevards or drives.  Quietly and without bond expenditure we have constructed magnificent examples.  Our school buildings were shabby and poor.  Many now are imposing and beautiful.

This list could be extended; but turn for a moment to matters of manners.  Where are the awful corner-groceries that helped the saloons to ruin men and boys, and where are the busy nickel-in-the-slot machines and shameless smokers in the street-cars?  Where are the sellers of lottery tickets, where the horse-races and the open gambling?

It was my fortune to be re-elected for eight years.  Sometimes I am impressed by how little I seem to have individually accomplished in this long period of time.  One effect of experience is to modify one’s expectations.  It is not nearly so easy to accomplish things as one who has not tried is apt to imagine.  Reforming is not an easy process.  Inertia is something really to be overcome, and one is often surprised to find how obstinate majorities can be.  Initiative is a rare faculty and an average legislator must be content to follow.  One can render good service sometimes by what he prevents.  Again, he may finally fail in some good purpose through no fault of his own, and yet win something even in losing.  Early in my term I was convinced that one thing that ought to be changed was our absurd liquor license.  We had by far the lowest tax of any city in the Union, and naturally had the largest number of saloons.  I tried to have the license raised from eighty-four dollars to one thousand dollars, hoping to reduce our twenty-four hundred saloons.  I almost succeeded.  When I failed the liquor interest was so frightened at its narrow escape that it led the people to adopt a five-hundred-dollar substitute.

I was led to undertake the correction of grave abuses and confusion in the naming of the city streets.  The post-office authorities were greatly hampered in the mail delivery by the duplicate use of names.  The dignified word “avenue” had been conferred on many alleys.  A commission worked diligently and efficiently.  One set of numbered streets was eliminated.  The names of men who had figured in the history of the city were given to streets bearing their initials.  Anza, Balboa, and Cabrillo gave meaning to A, B, and C. We gave Columbus an avenue, Lincoln a “way,” and substituted for East Street the original name of the waterfront, “The Embarcadero.”  In all we made more than four hundred changes and corrections.