as no object in my seeing him; it was only when the clash came
or was imminent that I had to see him. A series of breakfasts was always
the prelude to some active warfare.[*] In every instance I substantially
carried my point, although in some cases not in exactly the way in which
I had originally hoped.

[*] To illustrate my meaning I quote from a letter of mine
to Senator Platt of December 13, 1899. He had been trying to
get me to promote a certain Judge X over the head of another
Judge Y. I wrote: "There is a strong feeling among the
judges and the leading members of the bar that Judge Y ought
not to have Judge X jumped over his head, and I do not see
my way clear to doing it. I am inclined to think that the
solution I mentioned to you is the solution I shall have to
adopt. Remember the breakfast at Douglas Robinson's at
8:30."

There were various measures to which he gave a grudging and querulous
assent without any break being threatened. I secured the reenactment
of the Civil Service Law, which under my predecessor had very foolishly
been repealed. I secured a mass of labor legislation, including the
enactment of laws to increase the number of factory inspectors, to
create a Tenement House Commission (whose findings resulted in further
and excellent legislation to improve housing conditions), to regulate
and improve sweatshop labor, to make the eight-hour and prevailing rate
of wages law effective, to secure the genuine enforcement of the act
relating to the hours of railway workers, to compel railways to equip
freight trains with air-brakes, to regulate the working hours of women
and protect both women and children from dangerous machinery, to enforce
good scaffolding provisions for workmen on buildings, to provide seats
for the use of waitresses in hotels and restaurants, to reduce the
hours of labor for drug-store clerks, to provide for the registration of
laborers for municipal employment. I tried hard but failed to secure an
employers' liability law and the state control of employment offices.
There was hard fighting over some of these bills, and, what was much
more serious, there was effort to get round the law by trickery and by
securing its inefficient enforcement. I was continually helped by men
with whom I had gotten in touch while in the Police Department; men such
as James Bronson Reynolds, through whom I first became interested in
settlement work on t