Of course the investigations, disclosures, and proceedings of the investigating committee of which I was chairman brought me into bitter personal conflict with very powerful financiers, very powerful politicians, and with certain newspapers which these financiers and politicians controlled.  A number of able and unscrupulous men were fighting, some for their financial lives, and others to keep out of unpleasantly close neighborhood to State’s prison.  This meant that there were blows to be taken as well as given.  In such political struggles, those who went in for the kind of thing that I did speedily excited animosities among strong and cunning men who would stop at little to gratify their animosity.  Any man engaged in this particular type of militant and practical reform movement was soon made to feel that he had better not undertake to push matters home unless his own character was unassailable.  On one of the investigating committees on which I served there was a countryman, a very able man, who, when he reached New York City, felt as certain Americans do when they go to Paris—­that the moral restraints of his native place no longer applied.  With all his ability, he was not shrewd enough to realize that the Police Department was having him as well as the rest of us carefully shadowed.  He was caught red-handed by a plain-clothes man doing what he had no business to do; and from that time on he dared not act save as those who held his secret permitted him to act.  Thenceforth those officials who stood behind the Police Department had one man on the committee on whom they could count.  I never saw terror more ghastly on a strong man’s face than on the face of this man on one or two occasions when he feared that events in the committee might take such a course as to force him into a position where his colleagues would expose him even if the city officials did not.  However, he escaped, for we were never able to get the kind of proof which would warrant our asking for the action in which this man could not have joined.

Traps were set for more than one of us, and if we had walked into these traps our public careers would have ended, at least so far as following them under the conditions which alone make it worth while to be in public life at all.  A man can of course hold public office, and many a man does hold public office, and lead a public career of a sort, even if there are other men who possess secrets about him which he cannot afford to have divulged.  But no man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can act with rugged independence in serious crises, nor strike at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful and unscrupulous foes, if he is himself vulnerable in his private character.  Nor will clean conduct by itself enable a man to render good service.  I have always been fond of Josh Billings’s remark that “it is much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent.”  There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators;