weeks after we had begun, that for the first time in its existence there had not been a case due to a drunken brawl in the hospital all Monday.  The police courts gave the same testimony, while savings banks recorded increased deposits and pawnshops hard times.  The most touching of all things was the fact that we received letters, literally by the hundred, from mothers in tenement-houses who had never been allowed to take their children to the country in the wide-open days, and who now found their husbands willing to take them and their families for an outing on Sunday.  Jake Riis and I spent one Sunday from morning till night in the tenement districts, seeing for ourselves what had happened.

During the two years that we were in office things never slipped back to anything like what they had been before.  But we did not succeed in keeping them quite as highly keyed as during these first weeks.  As regards the Sunday-closing law, this was partly because public sentiment was not really with us.  The people who had demanded honesty, but who did not like to pay for it by the loss of illegal pleasure, joined the openly dishonest in attacking us.  Moreover, all kinds of ways of evading the law were tried, and some of them were successful.  The statute, for instance, permitted any man to take liquor with meals.  After two or three months a magistrate was found who decided judicially that seventeen beers and one pretzel made a meal—­after which decision joy again became unconfined in at least some of the saloons, and the yellow press gleefully announced that my “tyranny” had been curbed.  But my prime object, that of stopping blackmail, was largely attained.

All kinds of incidents occurred in connection with this crusade.  One of them introduced me to a friend who remains a friend yet.  His name was Edward J. Bourke.  He was one of the men who entered the police force through our examinations shortly after I took office.  I had summoned twenty or thirty of the successful applicants to let me look over them; and as I walked into the hall, one of them, a well-set-up man, called out sharply to the others, “Gangway,” making them move to one side.  I found he had served in the United States navy.  The incident was sufficient to make me keep him in mind.  A month later I was notified by a police reporter, a very good fellow, that Bourke was in difficulties, and that he thought I had better look into the matter myself, as Bourke was being accused by certain very influential men of grave misconduct in an arrest he had made the night before.  Accordingly, I took the matter up personally.  I found that on the new patrolman’s beat the preceding night—­a new beat—­there was a big saloon run by a man of great influence in political circles known as “King” Calahan.  After midnight the saloon was still running in full blast, and Bourke, stepping inside, told Calahan to close up.  It was at the time filled with “friends of personal liberty,” as Governor Hill used at that time,