e came to take it away to Baltimore. Just now the cashier
of ---- Bank told me that two other gentlemen--gamblers? yes, that's
what you call them--had drawn $130,000 which they would have invested
here, and had gone after him. Think of all that money gone to Baltimore!
That's what you've done!"

[Footnote 14: 1898, when Roosevelt was elected Governor after a
fierce fight with Tammany.]

I went over to police headquarters, thinking of the sad state of that
man, and in the hallway I ran across two children, little tots, who were
inquiring their way to "the commissioner." The older was a hunchback
girl, who led her younger brother (he could not have been over five or
six years old) by the hand. They explained their case to me. They came
from Allen Street. Some "bad ladies" had moved into the tenement, and
when complaint was made that sent the police there, the children's
father, who was a poor Jewish tailor, was blamed. The tenants took it
out of the boy by punching his nose till it bled. Whereupon the children
went straight to Mulberry Street to see "the commissioner" and get
justice. It was the first time in twenty years that I had known Allen
Street to come to police headquarters for justice and in the discovery
that the legacy of Roosevelt had reached even to the little children I
read the doom of the slum, despite its loud vauntings.

No, it was not true that reform was dead, with decency. We had our
innings four years later and proved it; of which more farther on. It was
not the slum that had won; it was we who had lost. We were not up to the
mark,--not yet. We may lose again, more than once, but even our losses
shall be our gains, if we learn from them. And we are doing that. New
York is a many times cleaner and better city to-day than it was twenty
or even ten years ago. Then I was able to grasp easily the whole plan
for wresting it from the neglect and indifference that had put us where
we were. It was chiefly, almost wholly, remedial in its scope. Now it is
preventive, constructive, and no ten men could gather all the threads
and hold them. We have made, are making, headway, and no Tammany has the
power to stop us. They know it, too, at the Hall, and were in such
frantic haste to fill their pockets this last time that they abandoned
their old ally, the tax rate, and the pretence of making bad government
cheap government. Tammany dug its arms into the treasury fairly up to
the elbows, raising taxes, asse