good of both of us--any man will speedily find that other people can
benefit him just as much as he can benefit them.

Neither Joe Murray nor I nor any of our associates at that time were
alive to social and industrial needs which we now all of us recognize.
But we then had very clearly before our minds the need of practically
applying certain elemental virtues, the virtues of honesty and
efficiency in politics, the virtue of efficiency side by side with
honesty in private and public life alike, the virtues of consideration
and fair dealing in business as between man and man, and especially as
between the man who is an employer and the man who is an employee.
On all fundamental questions Joe Murray and I thought alike. We never
parted company excepting on the question of Civil Service Reform, where
he sincerely felt that I showed doctrinaire affinities, that I sided
with the pharisees. We got back again into close relations as soon as
I became Police Commissioner under Mayor Strong, for Joe was then made
Excise Commissioner, and was, I believe, the best Excise Commissioner
the city of New York ever had. He is now a farmer, his boys have been
through Columbia College, and he and I look at the questions, political,
social, and industrial, which confront us in 1913 from practically the
same standpoint, just as we once looked at the questions that confronted
us in 1881.

There are many debts that I owe Joe Murray, and some for which he was
only unconsciously responsible. I do not think that a man is fit to do
good work in our American democracy unless he is able to have a
genuine fellow-feeling for, understanding of, and sympathy with his
fellow-Americans, whatever their creed or their birthplace, the section
in which they live, or the work which they do, provided they possess
the only kind of Americanism that really counts, the Americanism of the
spirit. It was no small help to me, in the effort to make myself a good
citizen and good American, that the political associate with whom I was
on closest and most intimate terms during my early years was a man born
in Ireland, by creed a Catholic, with Joe Murray's upbringing; just
as it helped me greatly at a later period to work for certain vitally
necessary public needs with Arthur von Briesen, in whom the spirit of
the "Acht-und-Vierziger" idealists was embodied; just as my whole life
was influenced by my long association with Jacob Riis, whom I am tempted
to call the best A