. A ten years' war : an account of the battle with the slum in New York . ng them; of the prison ward inBeUevue Hospital standing empty for threedays at a time, an astonishing and unprece-dented thing, which the warden could onlyattribute to the prompt closing of the sa-loons at one a. m. ; and of the pohce forcerecovering its lost self-respect, we had foundout more and greater things than whetherthe excise law was a good or a bad understood what Roosevelt meant whenhe insisted upon the primary virtues ofhonesty~and courage in the conduct of pub-lic business. For the want of them in us,
. A ten years' war : an account of the battle with the slum in New York . ng them; of the prison ward inBeUevue Hospital standing empty for threedays at a time, an astonishing and unprece-dented thing, which the warden could onlyattribute to the prompt closing of the sa-loons at one a. m. ; and of the pohce forcerecovering its lost self-respect, we had foundout more and greater things than whetherthe excise law was a good or a bad understood what Roosevelt meant whenhe insisted upon the primary virtues ofhonesty~and courage in the conduct of pub-lic business. For the want of them in us,half the laws that touched our daily lives hadbecome dead letters or vehicles of blackmailand oppression. It was worth something tohave that lesson taught us in that way; tofind out that simple, straightforward, honestdealing as between man and man is after alleffective in politics as in gunmaking. Per-haps we have not mastered the lesson we have not discharged the teacher,either. Courage, indeed ! There were times dur-ing that stormy spell when it seemed as if. g : WPiO (x, W m w .5 s ^ REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 243 we had grown wholly and hopelessly flabbyas a people. All the outcry against theprogramme of order did not come from thelawless and the disorderly, by any decent, conservative citizensjoined in counseling moderation and virtualcompromise with the law-breakers — it wasnothing else — to avoid trouble. Theold love of fair play had been whittled downby the jackknife of all-pervading expediencyto an ansemic desire to hold the scaleseven; that is a favorite modern device ofthe devil for paralyzing action in men. Youcannot hold the scales even in a moral inevitably results in the triumph of evU,which asks nothing better than the evenchance to which it is not entitled. Whenthe trouble in the Pohce Board had reacheda point where it seemed impossible not tounderstand that Koosevelt and his side werefighting a cold and treacherous conspiracy
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