arged the teacher, either.

Courage, indeed! There were times during that stormy spell when it
seemed as if we had grown wholly and hopelessly flabby as a people. All
the outcry against the programme of order did not come from the lawless
and the disorderly, by any means. Ordinarily decent, conservative
citizens joined in counselling moderation and virtual compromise with
the lawbreakers--it was nothing else--to "avoid trouble." The old love
of fair play had been whittled down by the jack-knife of all-pervading
expediency to an anaemic desire to "hold the scales even," which is a
favorite modern device of the devil for paralyzing action in men. You
cannot hold the scales even in a moral issue. It inevitably results in
the triumph of evil, which asks nothing better than the even chance to
which it is not entitled. When the trouble in the Police Board had
reached a point where it seemed impossible not to understand that
Roosevelt and his side were fighting a cold and treacherous conspiracy
against the cause of good government, we had the spectacle of a
Christian Endeavor Society inviting the man who had hatched the plot,
the bitter and relentless enemy whom the mayor had summoned to resign,
and afterward did his best to remove as a fatal obstacle to
reform,--inviting this man to come before it and speak of Christian
citizenship! It was a sight to make the bosses hug themselves with glee.
For Christian citizenship is their nightmare, and nothing is so cheering
to them as evidence that those who profess it have no sense.

Apart from the moral bearings of it, what this question of enforcement
of law means in the life of the poor was illustrated by testimony given
before the Police Board under oath. A captain was on trial for allowing
the policy swindle to go unchecked in his precinct. Policy is a kind of
penny lottery, with alleged daily drawings which never take place. The
whole thing is a pestilent fraud, which is allowed to exist only because
it pays heavy blackmail to the police and the politicians. Expert
witnesses testified that eight policy shops in the Twenty-first Ward,
which they had visited, did a business averaging about thirty-two
dollars a day each. The Twenty-first is a poor Irish tenement ward. The
policy sharks were getting two hundred and fifty dollars or more a day
of the hard-earned wages of those poor people, in sums of from one and
two cents to a quarter, without making any return for it. The thing
wou