THE REAL QUESTION

One of the police magistrates delivered a severe lecture from the bench in condemnation of this method of breaking up the traffic, on the ground that the statute forbidding the sale made it an offense for any one to be a party to it, and that the Police Board was violating the law as much as the liquor seller. Construing the law by its letter rather than its spirit, that may have been true; but the alternative proposed by this judge and other critics-that an officer in citizen's clothing could plant himself in the saloon, watch when the children came in for their liquor, and pounce upon the barkeeper in the act of selling-was obviously impracticable, and founded upon a false impression of the way such sales were conducted. The practise of the offending saloons was to admit child customers one by one into a narrow hallway, where they were out of sight of the ordinary patrons; this rendered it out of the question for any but a child who actually bought liquor to bring its seller to justice. The means which had to be employed was deplorable; but the question of morals to be settled was not whether it was right in itself to send a child after liquor, but whether it was better to do this a few times than to let the traffic go on indefi

nitely, as it had been going on for years in spite of all the legislation that could be invented for its suppression.

When he was Civil-Service Commissioner Mr. Roosevelt often had occasion to call into play his faculty for discriminating between the larger and the lesser good. One day a Washington newspaper published a series of sensational charges against the commission, alleging among other things that Mr. Roosevelt had shown himself as bad a spoilsman as any of the objects of his criticism, having gone place-hunting for a man whom he knew to be a rogue. "I demand an investigation," was the commissioner's prompt response, and he repeated it till he got what he wanted. The whole commission was under fire, as some of the charges were of the volley order. To recall all of these would make too long a story, but the one specially aimed at Mr. Roosevelt concerned his conduct in investigating the affairs of the postoffice at Milwaukee, where trickery and fraud of the worst sort had been practised in the appointment of clerks without reference to the merit system. It did not take Mr. Roosevelt long, after entering on this inquiry, to discover that all the trails of guilt led right to the door

TELL THE TRUTH

of one Shidy, a clerk and a member of the local Civil-Service Board who had access to the register of eligibles. He therefore induced Shidy to meet him for a confidential talk. For some time they had a fruitless sparring match of questions and answers. The commissioner convinced himself that the man knew more than he dared to tell, and, after exhausting other means of getting at this, came down upon him with a flat demand for a statement.

"You are a servant of the Government," said he, "and it is your duty to stand by the Government in its attempt to procure essential evidence. I want nothing but the truth, but I want every word of that."

"I am in ill health and poor," was Shidy's answer, "and I can not afford to lose my place in the post-office, as I certainly shall if I unbosom myself."

"I will take care of that," replied Mr. Roosevelt. "You shall not be punished for telling the truth. Trust me to see that the Government does its duty by you, if you do your

duty by the Government."

The result of this colloquy was a complete confession by Shidy of a most appalling series of frauds practised upon the local civil-service

system. The eligible registers had been "padded" with names which had no business there; the order of standing of candidates after examination had been altered so as to get this man into the service and bar that man out; and so forth. The worst of the whole matter was that Shidy unblushingly described just how he did these things himself. He professed to have done them at the instigation of the postmaster; but the actual work of padding and shifting had been performed by his own hands, with the collusive knowledge of certain other parties.

The young commissioner, who had hardly expected such a revelation when he promised immunity to the witness, stood by his word, disagreeable as it was to do so; and when Shidy, after paving the way for the postmaster's removal, was himself dismissed from office, Mr. Roosevelt tried hard to have him reinstated. Failing in this, he went to Superintendent Porter of the Census Office, and with the aid of his colleague, Mr. Thompson, procured a clerkship there for his protégé.

When the framework of this episode came out at the congressional investigation, Mr. Roosevelt's enemies believed that they had got

STANDING BY HIS RECORD

him into a corner and that he would have to find some shuffling excuse for lending himself to a scheme to keep such a scamp in the Government's employ with a full knowledge of his guilt. On the contrary, the commissioner went upon the stand and freely told the whole story from beginning to end. He defended his course by saying that, without direct testimony, any investigation by the commission would be a waste of time; the only way to get the necessary evidence in this instance was to promise that a wrongdoer who knew the truth should not suffer for telling it; and however repugnant it might be to him personally to carry out such a pledge after ascertaining all the facts, he felt that it was his duty to the Government to do so. It was a case where the larger good overshadowed the lesser, and he was prepared to stand by his record.

So impressed was the congressional committee with the candor and boldness of his attitude, that it declared in its report that the conduct of Messrs. Roosevelt and Thompson was not exceptional, nor did it "tend to the demoralization of the service. It would have been ground for criticism if, instead of keeping faith with the witness, they had permitted those who