but declared his belief that if Roosevelt would look into the matter
he would find that the proposed legislation was good. Politics, and
politicians, were like that in those days--as perhaps they still are
in these. The young aristocrat, who was fast becoming a stalwart and
aggressive democrat, expected to find himself against the bill; for,
as he has said, the "respectable people" and the "business men" whom
he knew did not believe in such intrusions upon the right even of
workingmen to do what they would with their own. The laissez faire
doctrine of economic life was good form in those days.

But the only member of that committee that approached the question with
an open mind found that his first impressions were wrong. He went down
into the tenement houses to see for himself. He found cigars being made
under conditions that were appalling. For example, he discovered
an apartment of one room in which three men, two women, and several
children--the members of two families and a male boarder--ate, slept,
lived, and made cigars. "The tobacco was stowed about everywhere,
alongside the foul bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of
food." These conditions were not exceptional; they were only a little
worse than was usual.

Roosevelt did not oppose the bill; he fought for it and it passed. Then
he appeared before Governor Cleveland to argue for it on behalf of the
Cigar-Makers' Union. The Governor hesitated, but finally signed it. The
Court of Appeals declared it unconstitutional, in a smug and well-fed
decision, which spoke unctuously of the "hallowed" influences of the
"home." It was a wicked decision, because it was purely academic, and
was removed as far as the fixed stars from the actual facts of life. But
it had one good result. It began the making of Theodore Roosevelt into
a champion of social justice, for, as he himself said, it was this case
which first waked him "to a dim and partial understanding of the fact
that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be
done to better social and industrial conditions."

When, a quarter, of a century later, Roosevelt left the Presidency and
became Contributing Editor of The Outlook, almost his first contribution
to that journal was entitled "A Judicial Experience." It told the story
of this law and its annulment by the court. Mr. William Travers Jerome
wrote a letter to The Outlook, taking Roosevelt sharply to task for his
criticism of the cou