FIGHTING THE SPOILS HUNTERS AND RASCALS 47 



The cause of his leaving the Commission was a summons from his 

 native city, which wanted him for President of its Board of PoHce 

 Commissioners. This strongly appealed to him. It was bringing him 

 back upon his old battlefield. It was a field which he knew inch by 

 inch. And it was one in which there was strenuous work to be done. 

 The rottenness of party politics had deeply invaded this department 

 and it sadly needed an earthquake shaking up. He went into it with 

 the earnest vim with which he was soon after to go into the Spanish 

 War. 



'T thought the storm center was in New York," he said, "and so 

 I came there. It is a great piece of practical work. I like to take 

 hold of work that has been done by a Tammany leader and do it as well, 

 only by approaching it from the opposite direction. The thing that 

 attracted me to it was that it was to be done in the hurly-burly, for I 

 don't like cloister Hfe." 



A reform administration, that of Mayor Strong, was then in 

 power, and soldiers of reform were needed to lead the ranks. The 

 new Commissioner stirred up the town. The regulation reformers 

 did not know whether to applaud or curse. Many declared that his 

 rigid enforcement of the Excise law enabled Tammany to return to 

 power by capturing the votes of liquor men who had temporarily joined 

 the reformers. In reply Roosevelt said he had sworn to enforce all 

 the laws and he would not compromise his conscience. Besides, he 

 held that the best way to get a bad law repealed was to rigidly enforce 

 it. The "Arabian Nights" features of Mr. Roosevelt's police adminis- 

 tration, his sudden appearance in unexpected places, his unheralded 

 personal tours of inspection about the city after dark, catching many a 

 policeman napping — all this and several volumes more are a part of 

 history. Roosevelt made fame and friends during his police regime, 

 and all classes admitted that he was an honest man. He said once, 

 at the close of a meeting, that he believed a majority of policemen were 

 good men. He believed in giving every applicant a chance to show 

 what he could do and treating him honestly and fairly, regardless of 

 his nationality, politics, religion or "pull." 



"We have every country represented on the police force," he said. 

 "Hebrews working harmoniously with Irishmen; Germans making 



