The man who was closest to me throughout my two years in the Police Department was Jacob Riis.  By this time, as I have said, I was getting our social, industrial, and political needs into pretty fair perspective.  I was still ignorant of the extent to which big men of great wealth played a mischievous part in our industrial and social life, but I was well awake to the need of making ours in good faith both an economic and an industrial as well as a political democracy.  I already knew Jake Riis, because his book “How the Other Half Lives” had been to me both an enlightenment and an inspiration for which I felt I could never be too grateful.  Soon after it was written I had called at his office to tell him how deeply impressed I was by the book, and that I wished to help him in any practical way to try to make things a little better.  I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds, of speech that does not result in action—­in other words, I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching what can be practiced and then in practicing it.  Jacob Riis had drawn an indictment of the things that were wrong, pitifully and dreadfully wrong, with the tenement homes and the tenement lives of our wage-workers.  In his book he had pointed out how the city government, and especially those connected with the departments of police and health, could aid in remedying some of the wrongs.

As President of the Police Board I was also a member of the Health Board.  In both positions I felt that with Jacob Riis’s guidance I would be able to put a goodly number of his principles into actual effect.  He and I looked at life and its problems from substantially the same standpoint.  Our ideals and principles and purposes, and our beliefs as to the methods necessary to realize them, were alike.  After the election in 1894 I had written him a letter which ran in part as follows: 

It is very important to the city to have a business man’s Mayor, but it is more important to have a workingman’s Mayor; and I want Mr. Strong to be that also. . . .  It is an excellent thing to have rapid transit, but it is a good deal more important, if you look at matters with a proper perspective, to have ample playgrounds in the poorer quarters of the city, and to take the children off the streets so as to prevent them growing up toughs.  In the same way it is an admirable thing to have clean streets; indeed, it is an essential thing to have them; but it would be a better thing to have our schools large enough to give ample accommodation to all who should be pupils and to provide them with proper playgrounds.

And I added, while expressing my regret that I had not been able to accept the street-cleaning commissionership, that “I would have been delighted to smash up the corrupt contractors and put the street-cleaning force absolutely out of the domain of politics.”

This was nineteen years ago, but it makes a pretty good platform in municipal politics even to-day—­smash corruption, take the municipal service out of the domain of politics, insist upon having a Mayor who shall be a workingman’s Mayor even more than a business man’s Mayor, and devote all attention possible to the welfare of the children.