ng. In the whole
business of fighting fires there is no place for a mean or a base
motive, and can be none. Therefore, meanness and baseness go out of
fashion just as whining goes out of fashion on a football team. It's the
fashion among firemen to do fine things.

Let me give a further instance to show what this fire department fashion
does for men at the very top--for battalion chiefs and deputy chiefs and
the chief himself. It swings them into line like men in the ranks. With
the chance to work less, they find themselves working harder. With
orders to take from no one, they assume voluntarily a severer duty than
any man would put upon them. And this even if power has come through the
way of politics, through influence or scheming. Let the most
spoils-soaked veteran become chief of a city fire department and I
believe we should see him, in spite of himself, forgetting his
pocket-stuffing principles, and seeking the heroic goal, though it kill
him. Which it probably would. As a matter of fact, New York has never
had a chief who did not work harder than his men, and spare himself less
than he spared his men.

Take our present chief, Edward F. Croker, the youngest man who ever held
this place. Let me run over his twenty-four hours, from eight in the
evening, when he goes on night duty at the Great Jones Street
engine-house. From now until daylight he will cover personally some two
hundred stations on the first alarm--that is, everything from
Twenty-third Street to the Battery, the region of greatest danger. And
on the second or third alarm he will cover the whole of Manhattan
Island. That means answering every night from two to a dozen calls
scattered over a great area. It means a pair of horses (Dan and John,
usually) and driver clean worn out when morning comes. And it means to
the chief, besides physical fatigue, an exhausting responsibility in
quickly judging each fire and outlining the way of fighting it.

Almost a day's work this, one would say, but it is only a beginning.
However broken his rest, the chief is up at seven in the morning--and
note that what sleep he gets, three, four, five hours, is at an
engine-house, not at his home--and by nine he is at headquarters, in
Sixty-seventh Street, ready for a hard morning transacting business for
the department, doing as much work as a merchant in his counting-room.
This until one o'clock.

Then no luncheon (all fire chiefs are two-meal men), but off for a
four-ho