The work of the Police Department,
however, was in my line, and I was glad to undertake it.
The man who was closest to me throughout my two years in the Police
Department was Jacob Riis. By this time, as I have said, I was
getting our social, industrial, and political needs into pretty fair
perspective. I was still ignorant of the extent to which big men of
great wealth played a mischievous part in our industrial and social
life, but I was well awake to the need of making ours in good faith
both an economic and an industrial as well as a political democracy. I
already knew Jake Riis, because his book "How the Other Half Lives" had
been to me both an enlightenment and an inspiration for which I felt I
could never be too grateful. Soon after it was written I had called at
his office to tell him how deeply impressed I was by the book, and that
I wished to help him in any practical way to try to make things a little
better. I have always had a horror of words that are not translated
into deeds, of speech that does not result in action--in other words,
I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching what
can be practiced and then in practicing it. Jacob Riis had drawn an
indictment of the things that were wrong, pitifully and dreadfully
wrong, with the tenement homes and the tenement lives of our
wage-workers.
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