in moments of pathos, to term everybody who regarded as tyranny any restriction on the sale of liquor.  Calahan’s saloon had never before in its history been closed, and to have a green cop tell him to close it seemed to him so incredible that he regarded it merely as a bad jest.  On his next round Bourke stepped in and repeated the order.  Calahan felt that the jest had gone too far, and by way of protest knocked Bourke down.  This was an error of judgment on his part, for when Bourke arose he knocked down Calahan.  The two then grappled and fell on the floor, while the “friends of personal liberty” danced around the fight and endeavored to stamp on everything they thought wasn’t Calahan.  However, Bourke, though pretty roughly handled, got his man and shut the saloon.  When he appeared against the lawbreaker in court next day, he found the court-room crowded with influential Tammany Hall politicians, backed by one or two Republican leaders of the same type; for Calahan was a baron of the underworld, and both his feudal superiors and his feudal inferiors gathered to the rescue.  His backers in court included a Congressman and a State Senator, and so deep-rooted was the police belief in “pull” that his own superiors had turned against Bourke and were preparing to sacrifice him.  Just at this time I acted on the information given me by my newspaper friend by starting in person for the court.  The knowledge that I knew what was going on, that I meant what I said, and that I intended to make the affair personal, was all that was necessary.  Before I reached the court all effort to defend Calahan had promptly ceased, and Bourke had come forth triumphant.  I immediately promoted him to roundsman.  He is a captain now.  He has been on the force ever since, save that when the Spanish War came he obtained a holiday without pay for six months and reentered the navy, serving as gun captain in one of the gunboats, and doing his work, as was to be expected, in first-rate fashion, especially when under fire.

Let me again say that when men tell me that the police are irredeemably bad I remember scores and hundreds of cases like this of Bourke, like the case I have already mentioned of Raphael, like the other cases I have given above.

It is useless to tell me that these men are bad.  They are naturally first-rate men.  There are no better men anywhere than the men of the New York police force; and when they go bad it is because the system is wrong, and because they are not given the chance to do the good work they can do and would rather do.  I never coddled these men.  I punished them severely whenever I thought their conduct required it.  All I did was to try to be just; to reward them when they did well; in short, to act squarely by them.  I believe that, as a whole, they liked me.  When, in 1912, I ran for President on the Progressive ticket, I received a number of unsigned letters inclosing sums of money for the campaign.  One of these inclosed twenty dollars.  The writer,