But he got up next day, and the next, and the next after that, and demanded that the dishonest judge be investigated.  And on the eighth day, his motion was carried by a vote of 104 to 6.  The politicians saw to it that the judge escaped, but it was shown that Roosevelt’s charges were true ones.  And New York State found that she had an Assemblyman with a back-bone.

Roosevelt carried some bills for the cause of better government through the Assembly and they were signed by a courageous and honest Governor, named Grover Cleveland.  Thomas Nast, America’s great cartoonist of those days, drew a cartoon of the two men together.  Cleveland was forty-four and Roosevelt was twenty-three.

One of the most important events while he was in the Assembly arose from a bill to regulate the manufacture of cigars in New York City.  He had found that cigars were often made under the most unhealthy surroundings in the single living room of a family in a tenement.  In one house which he investigated himself, there were two families, and a boarder, all living in one room, while one or more of the men carried on the manufacture of cigars in the same room.  Everything about the place was filthy, and both for the health of the families and of the possible users of the cigars, it was necessary to have this state of affairs ended.

He advocated a bill which passed, and was signed by Governor Cleveland, forbidding such manufacture.  So far, so good; but there were persons who found that the law was against their interests.  They succeeded in getting the Court of Appeals to set the law aside, and in their decision the judges said the law was an assault upon the “hallowed associations” of the home!

This made Roosevelt wake to the fact that courts were not always the best judges of the living conditions of classes of people with whom they had no contact They knew the law; they did not know life.  The decision blocked tenement house reform in New York for twenty years, and was one more item in Roosevelt’s political education.

CHAPTER IV

“Ranch life and the hunting Trail”

At the end of Mr. Roosevelt’s membership in the New York Assembly, he began his life on a ranch in North Dakota.  In this way he not only learned much about the Western people, but came to know the ranchman’s life, and to have his first chance to shoot big game.

He had married Miss Lee in 1880, the autumn of the year he left college.  Less than four years afterwards his wife died, following the birth of a daughter.  His mother died on the next day, and Roosevelt under the sorrow of these two losses, left New York, and spent almost all his time on his ranch, the Elkhorn, at Medora.

The people in Dakota looked on this Eastern tenderfoot with a little amusement, and, at first, probably with some contempt.  He was, to their minds, a “college dude” from the East, and moreover he wore eyeglasses.  To some of the people whom he met, this fact, he says, was enough to cause distrust.  Eyeglasses were under suspicion.