somehow or other the existence of that feeling would
have been known and resented. As a matter of
fact, there was not the slightest temptation on my
part to have any such feeling or any one of such feelings.
I no more expected special consideration in politics
than I would have expected it in the boxing ring.
I wished to act squarely to others, and I wished to
be able to show that I could hold my own as against
others. The attitude of my new friends toward
me was first one of polite reserve, and then that of
friendly alliance. Afterwards I became admitted
to comradeship, and then to leadership. I need
hardly say how earnestly I believe that men should
have a keen and lively sense of their obligations in
politics, of their duty to help forward great causes,
and to struggle for the betterment of conditions that
are unjust to their fellows, the men and women who
are less fortunate in life. But in addition to
this feeling there must be a feeling of real fellowship
with the other men and women engaged in the same task,
fellowship of work, with fun to vary the work; for
unless there is this feeling of fellowship, of common
effort on an equal plane for a common end, it will
be difficult to keep the relations wholesome and natural.
To be patronized is as offensive as to be insulted.
No one of us cares permanently to have some one else
conscientiously striving to do him good; what we want
is to work with that some one else for the good of
both of us—any man will speedily find that
other people can benefit him just as much as he can
benefit them.
Neither Joe Murray nor I nor any of our associates
at that time were alive to social and industrial needs
which we now all of us recognize. But we then
had very clearly before our minds the need of practically
applying certain elemental virtues, the virtues of
honesty and efficiency in politics, the virtue of
efficiency side by side with honesty in private and
public life alike, the virtues of consideration and
fair dealing in business as between man and man, and
especially as between the man who is an employer and
the man who is an employee. On all fundamental
questions Joe Murray and I thought alike. We never
parted company excepting on the question of Civil Service
Reform, where he sincerely felt that I showed doctrinaire
affinities, that I sided with the pharisees.
We got back again into close relations as soon as
I became Police Commissioner under Mayor Strong, for
Joe was then made Excise Commissioner, and was, I
believe, the best Excise Commissioner the city of
New York ever had. He is now a farmer, his boys
have been through Columbia College, and he and I look
at the questions, political, social, and industrial,
which confront us in 1913 from practically the same
standpoint, just as we once looked at the questions
that confronted us in 1881.