l Service Law, which under
his predecessor had been repealed, and put through a mass of labor
legislation for the betterment of conditions under which the workers
carried on their daily lives. This legislation included laws to increase
the number of factory inspectors, to create a tenement-house commission,
to regulate sweatshop labor, to make the eight-hour and prevailing rate
of wages law effective, to compel railways to equip freight trains with
air brakes, to regulate the working hours of women, to protect 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. He worked hard to secure an employers' liability
law, but the time for this was not yet come.

Many of these reforms are now matters of course that no employer would
think of attempting to eliminate. But they were new ideas then; and it
took vision and courage to fight for them.

Roosevelt would have been glad to be elected Governor for a second term.
But destiny, working through curious instruments, would not have it so.
He left behind him in the Empire State, not only a splendid record of
concrete achievement but something more than that. Jacob Riis has told
how, some time after, an old State official at Albany, who had seen many
Governors come and go, revealed this intangible something. Mr. Riis had
said to him that he did not care much for Albany since Roosevelt had
gone, and his friend replied: "Yes, we think so, many of us. The place
seemed dreary when he was gone. But I know now that he left something
behind that was worth our losing him to get. This past winter, for the
first time, I heard the question spring up spontaneously, as it seemed,
when a measure was up in the Legislature 'Is it right?' Not 'Is it
expedient?' not 'How is it going to help me?' not 'What is it worth to
the party?' Not any of these, but 'Is it right?' That is Roosevelt's
legacy to Albany. And it was worth his coming and his going to have
that."

CHAPTER VI. ROOSEVELT BECOMES PRESIDENT

There was chance in Theodore Roosevelt's coming into the Presidency
as he did, but there was irony as well. An evil chance dropped William
McKinley before an assassin's bullet; but there was a fitting irony in
the fact that the man who must step in