derworld, and both his feudal superiors and his feudal inferiors
gathered to the rescue. His backers in court included a Congressman and
a State Senator, and so deep-rooted was the police belief in "pull"
that his own superiors had turned against Bourke and were preparing to
sacrifice him. Just at this time I acted on the information given me by
my newspaper friend by starting in person for the court. The knowledge
that I knew what was going on, that I meant what I said, and that I
intended to make the affair personal, was all that was necessary. Before
I reached the court all effort to defend Calahan had promptly ceased,
and Bourke had come forth triumphant. I immediately promoted him to
roundsman. He is a captain now. He has been on the force ever since,
save that when the Spanish War came he obtained a holiday without pay
for six months and reentered the navy, serving as gun captain in one of
the gunboats, and doing his work, as was to be expected, in first-rate
fashion, especially when under fire.

Let me again say that when men tell me that the police are irredeemably
bad I remember scores and hundreds of cases like this of Bourke, like
the case I have already mentioned of Raphael, like the other cases I
have given above.

It is useless to tell me that these men are bad. They are naturally
first-rate men. There are no better men anywhere than the men of the
New York police force; and when they go bad it is because the system
is wrong, and because they are not given the chance to do the good work
they can do and would rather do. I never coddled these men. I punished
them severely whenever I thought their conduct required it. All I did
was to try to be just; to reward them when they did well; in short, to
act squarely by them. I believe that, as a whole, they liked me. When,
in 1912, I ran for President on the Progressive ticket, I received a
number of unsigned letters inclosing sums of money for the campaign. One
of these inclosed twenty dollars. The writer, who did not give his
name, said that he was a policeman, that I had once had him before me on
charges, and had fined him twenty dollars; that, as a matter of fact,
he had not committed the offense for which I fined him, but that the
evidence was such that he did not wonder that I had been misled, and
never blamed me for it, because I had acted squarely and had given
honest and decent men a chance in the Police Department; and that now he
inclosed a twenty-dolla