of a century following the passage of this tenement-house legislation, did at last thoroughly wake me to the actual fact.  I grew to realize that all that Abraham Lincoln had said about the Dred Scott decision could be said with equal truth and justice about the numerous decisions which in our own day were erected as bars across the path of social reform, and which brought to naught so much of the effort to secure justice and fair dealing for workingmen and workingwomen, and for plain citizens generally.

Some of the wickedness and inefficiency in public life was then displayed in simpler fashion than would probably now be the case.  Once or twice I was a member of committees which looked into gross and widely ramifying governmental abuses.  On the whole, the most important part I played was in the third Legislature in which I served, when I acted as chairman of a committee which investigated various phases of New York City official life.

The most important of the reform measures our committee recommended was the bill taking away from the Aldermen their power of confirmation over the Mayor’s appointments.  We found that it was possible to get citizens interested in the character and capacity of the head of the city, so that they would exercise some intelligent interest in his conduct and qualifications.  But we found that as a matter of fact it was impossible to get them interested in the Aldermen and other subordinate officers.  In actual practice the Aldermen were merely the creatures of the local ward bosses or of the big municipal bosses, and where they controlled the appointments the citizens at large had no chance whatever to make their will felt.  Accordingly we fought for the principle, which I believe to be of universal application, that what is needed in our popular government is to give plenty of power to a few officials, and to make these few officials genuinely and readily responsible to the people for the exercise of that power.  Taking away the confirming power of the Board of Aldermen did not give the citizens of New York good government.  We knew that if they chose to elect the wrong kind of Mayor they would have bad government, no matter what the form of the law was.  But we did secure to them the chance to get good government if they desired, and this was impossible as long as the old system remained.  The change was fought in the way in which all similar changes always are fought.  The corrupt and interested politicians were against it, and the battle-cries they used, which rallied to them most of the unthinking conservatives, were that we were changing the old constitutional system, that we were defacing the monuments of the wisdom of the founders of the government, that we were destroying that distinction between legislative and executive power which was the bulwark of our liberties, and that we were violent and unscrupulous radicals with no reverence for the past.