done, but that timid politician replied to the
Chairman of the committee that "he would hold himself at the service
of the Committee for any date on which Mr. Roosevelt was not to be
present." The politicians with uneasy consciences were getting a little
wary about face-to-face encounters with the young fighter. Nevertheless
Roosevelt's testimony was given and circulated broadcast, as Major
Putnam writes, "much to the dissatisfaction of the Postmaster General
and probably of the President."

The six years which Roosevelt spent on the Civil Service Commission
were for him years of splendid training in the methods and practices
of political life. What he learned then stood him in good stead when he
came to the Presidency. Those years of Roosevelt's gave an impetus to
the cause of civil reform which far surpassed anything it had received
until his time. Indeed, it is probably not unfair to say that it has
received no greater impulse since.

CHAPTER IV. HAROUN AL ROOSEVELT

In 1895, at the age of thirty-six, Roosevelt was asked by Mayor Strong
of New York City, who had just been elected on an anti-Tammany ticket,
to become a member of his Administration. Mayor Strong wanted him for
Street Cleaning Commissioner. Roosevelt definitely refused that office,
on the ground that he had no special fitness for it, but accepted
readily the Mayor's subsequent proposal that he should become President
of the Police Commission, knowing that there was a job that he could do.

There was plenty of work to be done in the Police Department. The
conditions under which it must be done were dishearteningly unfavorable.
In the first place, the whole scheme of things was wrong. The Police
Department was governed by one of those bi-partisan commissions which
well-meaning theorists are wont sometimes to set up when they think that
the important thing in government is to have things arranged so that
nobody can do anything harmful. The result often is that nobody can do
anything at all. There were four Commissioners, two supposed to belong
to one party and two to the other. There was also a Chief of Police,
appointed by the Commission, who could not be removed without a trial
subject to review by the courts. The scheme put a premium on intriguing
and obstruction. It was far inferior to the present plan of a single
Commissioner with full power, subject only to the Mayor who appoints
him.

But there is an interesting lesson to be learned from a