“In New York you are doing the greatest work of which any American to-day is capable, and exhibiting to the young men of the country the spectacle of a very important office administered by a man of high character in the most efficient way amid a thousand difficulties.  As a lesson in politics, I cannot think of anything more instructive.” [Footnote:  Thayer, “Theodore Roosevelt,” p. 106.]

How did he do this?  First, he tried to keep politics out of the police-force,—­to appoint men because they would make good officers, not because they were Republicans or Democrats.  Next, he tried to reward and promote policemen who had proved themselves brave,—­who had saved people in burning houses or from drowning, or had arrested violent men at great danger to themselves.  This is commonly done in the New York Police Department to-day:  it was not so common before 1895.  Roosevelt and his fellow commissioners found one old policeman who had saved twenty-five people from drowning and two or three from burning buildings.  They gave him his first promotion.  He began to have the Department pay for a policeman’s uniform when it was torn in making an arrest or otherwise ruined in the performance of duty.  Before, the policeman had had to pay for a new uniform himself.  He had each policeman trained to use a pistol, so that if he had to fire it at a criminal, he would hit the criminal, and not somebody else.  He did his best to stop the custom of selling beer and whiskey to children.  Finally he stopped disrespect for law by having law enforced, whether people liked it or not.

Of course, this got him into hot water.  One of our worst faults in America lies in passing a tremendous number of laws, and then letting them be broken.  In many instances the worst troubles are with laws about strong drink.  People in the State, outside of New York City, and some of those in the City, wished to have a law to close the saloons on Sunday.  So they passed it.  But so few people in the City really wished such a law, so many of them wished to drink on Sunday, that the saloons stayed open, and the saloon-keepers paid bribes to the police for “protection.”  The result was not temperance, but the opposite.  Moreover it led to disrespect for the law, and corruption for the police.  It was not Commissioner Roosevelt’s business whether the law was a wise one or not, but it was his business to enforce it.

He enforced it, and had the saloons closed.  As he said:  “The howl that rose was deafening.  The professional politicians raved.  The yellow-press surpassed themselves in clamor and mendacity.  A favorite assertion was that I was enforcing a ‘blue law,’ an obsolete law that had never before been enforced.  As a matter of fact, I was enforcing honestly a law that had hitherto been enforced dishonestly.” [Footnote:  “Autobiography,” p. 210.]

In the end, those who wished to drink on Sundays found a way to do it, and the law intended to regulate drinking habits failed, as such laws nearly always have done.  A judge decided that as drink could be served with meals, a man need only eat one sandwich or a pretzel and he could then drink seventeen beers, or as many as he liked.  But the result of Roosevelt’s action had nearly stopped bribe-giving to the police.  So there was something gained.