Experienced politicians always warn young men who wish to rise in politics, who wish to hold high office in the state or national government, to keep out of city politics.  It is a graveyard for reputations, and it was that in 1895, when Roosevelt took charge of the New York Police, even more than to-day.

Between the unreasonable reformers, who expect perfection, arrived at in their own way; the sensible folk who demand an honest government; the lax and easy-going people who do not care how much rottenness there is about, so that it is kept partly covered up (and this is one of the largest classes) and the plain criminals who are out for graft and plunder, the city office-holder is torn in a dozen ways at once.

If he is dishonest or weak, he goes under immediately.  If he is honest, but lacking in perfect courage, he is nearly useless.  And if he is both honest and brave, but has not good brains, is not able to use his mind quickly and well, he is either helpless, or soon placed in a position where he seems to have been dishonorable.  For, of course the first method which a crooked man uses to destroy his honest opponent, is to try to make him look crooked, too.  Often during his life Roosevelt insisted upon the fact that a man in public life must not only be honest, but that he must have a back-bone and a good head into the bargain.

Nothing but a sense of public duty, nothing but a desire to help the cause of better government, could have made a man take the Police Commissionership in 1895.  Mayor Strong, on a Reform ticket, had beaten Tammany Hall.  He wanted an able and energetic man and so sent for Roosevelt.  The condition of the Police Department sounds more like a chapter from a dime novel gone mad, than from any real state of things which could exist in a modern city.  Yet it did exist.

The police were supposed to protect the city against crime.  What they really did was to stop some of the crime—­when the criminal had no “pull”—­and to protect the rest of it.  The criminal handed over a certain amount of his plunder to the police, and they let him go on with his crime.  More than that, they saw that no one bothered him.  There was a regular scale of prices for things varying all the way from serious crime down to small offenses.  It cost more to be a highway robber, burglar, gun-man or murderer, for instance, than merely to keep a saloon open after the legal time for closing.  A man had to pay more for running a big gambling-house, than simply for blocking the side-walk with rubbish and ash-cans.

Roosevelt found that most of the policemen were honest, or wished to be honest.  But, surrounded as they were by grafters, it was almost impossible for a man to keep straight.  If he began by accepting little bribes, he ended, as he rose in power, by taking big ones, and finally he was in partnership with the chief rascals.  The hideous system organized by the powerful men in Tammany Hall spread outward and downward, and at last all over the city.  Roosevelt did not stop all the crime, of course, nor leave the city spotless when he ended his two years service.  But he did make it possible for one of his chief opponents, one of the severest of all critics, Mr. Godkin, a newspaper editor, to write him, at the end of his term of office: