got out of law-breaking in a small way. In this he
was merely following the ruling fashion. Laws were apparently made for
no other purpose that he could see. Such a view as he enjoyed of their
makers and executors at election seasons inspired him with seasonable
enthusiasm, but hardly with awe. A slogan, now, like that raised by
Tammany's late candidate for district attorney,[31]--"To hell with
reform!"--was something he could grasp. Of what reform meant he had only
the vaguest notion, but this thing had the right ring to it. Roosevelt
preaching enforcement of law was from the first a "lobster" to him, not
to be taken seriously. It is not among the least of the merits of the
man that, by his sturdy personality, as well as by his unyielding
persistence, he won the boy over to the passive admission that there
might be something in it. It had not been his experience.

[Footnote 31: In the first Greater New York election.]

There was the law which sternly commanded him to go to school, and which
he laughed at every day. Then there was the law to prevent child labor.
It cost twenty-five cents for a false age certificate to break that, and
Jacob, if he thought of it at all, probably thought of perjury as rather
an expensive thing. A quarter was a good deal to pay for the right to
lock a child up in a factory, when he ought to have been at play. The
excise law was everybody's game. The sign that hung in every saloon,
saying that nothing was sold there to minors, never yet barred out his
"growler" when he had the price. There was another such sign in the
tobacco shop, forbidding the sale of cigarettes to boys of his age.
Jacob thought that when he had the money he smoked as many as fifteen
packs a day, and he laughed when he told me. He laughed, too, when he
remembered how the boys of the East Side took to carrying balls of cord
in their pockets, on the wave of the Lexow reform, on purpose to
measure the distance from the school door to the nearest saloon. They
had been told that it should be two hundred feet, according to law.
There were schools that had as many as a dozen within the tabooed
limits. It was in the papers how, when the highest courts said that the
law was good, the saloon keepers attacked _the schools_ as a nuisance
and detrimental to property. In a general way Jacob sided with the
saloon keeper; not because he had any opinion about it, but because it
seemed natural. Such opinions as he ordinarily had he got