sentimentality, excuse the girl from her duty to keep herself pure.  Our duty to achieve the same moral level for the two sexes must be performed by raising the level for the man, not by lowering it for the woman; and the fact that society must recognize its duty in no shape or way relieves, not even to the smallest degree, the individual from doing his or her duty.  Sentimentality which grows maudlin on behalf of the willful prostitute is a curse; to confound her with the entrapped or coerced girl, the real white slave, is both foolish and wicked.  There are evil women just as there are evil men, naturally depraved girls just as there are naturally depraved young men; and the right and wise thing, the just thing, to them, and the generous thing to innocent girls and decent men, is to wage stern war against the evil creatures of both sexes.

In company with Jacob Riis, I did much work that was not connected with the actual discipline of the force or indeed with the actual work of the force.  There was one thing which he and I abolished—­police lodging-houses, which were simply tramp lodging-houses, and a fruitful encouragement to vagrancy.  Those who read Mr. Riis’s story of his own life will remember the incidents that gave him from actual personal experience his horror of these tramp lodging-houses.  As member of the Health Board I was brought into very close relations with the conditions of life in the tenement-house districts.  Here again I used to visit the different tenement-house regions, usually in company with Riis, to see for myself what the conditions were.  It was largely this personal experience that enabled me while on the Health Board to struggle not only zealously, but with reasonable efficiency and success, to improve conditions.  We did our share in making forward strides in the matter of housing the working people of the city with some regard to decency and comfort.

The midnight trips that Riis and I took enabled me to see what the Police Department was doing, and also gave me personal insight into some of the problems of city life.  It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowded tenements, and it is quite another actually to see what that overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection during the hours of darkness.  There was a very hot spell one midsummer while I was Police Commissioner, and most of each night I spent walking through the tenement-house districts and visiting police stations to see what was being done.  It was a tragic week.  We did everything possible to alleviate the suffering.  Much of it was heartbreaking, especially the gasping misery of the little children and of the worn-out mothers.  Every resource of the Health Department, of the Police Department, and even the Fire Department (which flooded the hot streets) was taxed in the effort to render service.  The heat killed such multitudes of horses that the means at our disposal for removing