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 only enforcing honestly a law that had hitherto
been enforced dishonestly. There was very little increase in the number
of arrests made for violating the Sunday law. Indeed, there were weeks
when the number of arrests went down. The only difference was that
there was no protected class. Everybody was arrested alike, and I took
especial pains to see that there was no discrimination, and that the
big men and the men with political influence were treated like every one
else. The immediate effect was wholly good. I had been told that it
was not possible to close the saloons on Sunday and that I could
not succeed. However, I did succeed. The warden of Bellevue Hospital
reported, two or three weeks after we had begun, that for the first time
in its existence there had not been a case due to a drunken brawl in the
hospital all Monday. The police courts gave the same testimony, while
savings banks recorded increased deposits and pawnshops hard times.
The most touching of all things was the fact that we received letters,
literally by the hundred, from mothers in tenement-houses who had never
been allowed to take their children to the country in the wide-open
days, and who now found their husbands willing to take them and their
families for an outing on Sunday. Jake Riis and I spent one Sunday from
morning till night in the tenement districts, seeing for ourselves what
had happened.

During the two years that we were in office things never slipped back
to anything like what they had been before. But we did not succeed
in keeping them quite as highly keyed as during these first weeks. As
regards the Sunday-closing law, this was partly because public sentiment
was not really with us. The people who had demanded honesty, but who
did not like to pay for it by the loss of illegal pleasure, joined the
openly dishonest in attacking us. Moreover, all kinds of ways of evading
the law were tried, and some of them were successful. The statute, for
instance, permitted any man to take liquor with meals. After two
or three months a magistrate was found who decided judicially that
seventeen beers and one pretzel made a meal--after which decision joy
again became unconfined in at least some of the saloons, and