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opinion to a magistrate. In this, the first instance of such departure, he had scarcely declared the room in which he sat a courtroom and himself a judge presiding, when a man, perfectly well known to the invading party, detached himself from the crowd, and said, sotto voce: Mr. Jerome, I can't afford to be caught here; you must help me get out." You don't seem to understand that this is a court-room. Hold up your hand and be sworn." The man hesitated. People who have talked with Mr. Jerome only in clubs have never met the judge. His manner in court is exceptionally tranquil and unassuming; but every spectator knows himself to stand in presence of the power and dignity of the law. You can take your choice, and take it quickly: go to jail for contempt of court, or hold up your hand." The man held up his hand and was sworn. "What is your name?" "John Doe." "I shall be obliged to commit John Doe to the House of Detention in order to find him when I want him. I do not know his residence." Then the unwilling prisoner told his name: he was Maurice Holahan, President of the Board of Public Works. He explained to the newspapers the next day that he had gone to 20 Dey Street looking for his "wayward son." Neither the newspapers nor the public took the explanation seriously, and the wayward son was indignant. Indeed, the town shook with irreverent laughter, and the wayward son made undutiful revelations about certain of his father's dealings in contracts with the city.

This was the first of Mr. Jerome's John Doe raids. The Committee of Five never asked him, or any one, for another warrant. The little comedy Mr. Croker had planned turned suddenly too grave for his taste, and the Committee of Five ceased to exist. The Committee of Fifteen awoke to the fact that they had found a man precisely suited to their needs. They were nonpolitical and non-partisan; they were in search of information about the actual conditions of police rule in New York City; when their informants led them to believe that a place should be raided, they applied to Mr. Jerome for the warrants. The hunting of John Doe was undertaken in earnest, with Mr. Jerome as chief huntsman. John Doe was Mr. Devery, as supposedly the official head of the system of

blackmail by the police; but any confederate or subordinate of his was welcome game. In view of the current belief that gambling in the city was in the hands of a small syndicate of Mr. Devery's intimate friends, it was determined to make gambling-houses the main objective of the raids. The keepers of the gamblinghouses were not themselves the men wanted; they were taken into custody and prosecuted mainly in the hope that some of them would turn State's evidence. They had paid their money for protection; it was hoped that when they found the police coul not deliver the goods, they would rise against their blackmailers.

Through the spring and summer months, night after night, the raids went on, Mr. Jerome risking his life freely among the least scrupulous class in the city. He had not sought the position of chief huntsman or its notoriety. He was not a professional reformer or an aspirant for political advancement; he was ostensibly a club-man and man about town like another. As a Deputy Assistant in the District Attorney's office, and later as a Judge, he had learned the police game; he was, at once by knowledge and position, the one man who could and would do the work cut out for the Committee of Fifteen. Conducting a raid, examining the prisoners, waiting at the police station afterward for such of them as could secure bail, meant commonly staying abroad all night; and his official duties required him to open court in the Special Sessions at ten the next morning. His fellow clubmen criticised him for making himself conspicuous. His brother lawyers and judges criticised him for "lowering the dignity of the bench." The newspapers caricatured him as Carrie Nation Jerome with a little hatchet. No doubt he enjoyed certain incidents in many of his nights; but the man who enjoys leading or assisting in a raid must be of an adventurous sort. It is the custom in raiding to send two or three men in advance whose business it is to mix with the players. On the first notice that the rush has begun, they are two or three against a hundred; they must hold the crowd from escaping by door or window. On battering down the door of one pool-room, Mr. Jerome discovered on the inside one of his own men, Hammond, with a prisoner in his left hand,

a prisoner and a revolver in his right, struggling forward to the arrest of a third. McLellan, another of his assistants (who was held for examination before a magistrate for having shot, on a more recent raid, a man who had fired twice at him), was on three occasions overpowered and beaten to a pulp before the rest of his party outside could break in and come to his assist ance. More than once Mr. Jerome himself was obliged to bear a hand in a free fight before he could open one of his phenomenally informal courts. At times, of course, the raid ended in pure comedy. One evening Mr. Jerome and his party took by storm an absolutely empty house. The appurtenances of gambling were in evidence, but the John Doe warrants remained in the pockets of the Justice; he found nobody to serve them on. He sat on a roulette-table and said: "Sporting life is checkered, but never dull; some days you can't lay up a cent;" when there blew in from the street a young exquisite, who, at sight of his hosts, looked as if he were taking the count in order to get his bearings. "I-I beg pardon," he said, vaguely. "Not at all," said the Judge;

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we were just waiting for you. I am Judge Jerome, and this is a court in session. Hold up your hand and be sworn. Tell the truth and no harm will come to you. Try on any nonsense and you will pass the night in the House of Detention. You can take your choice." As a bystander said, the young exquisite “sweated tacks," and was sworn. Before he could be asked a question, he turned to one of Mr. Jerome's party and said hurriedly: "I say, old man, can you give me a cigarette? Thanks. By Jove, I need one!" Then he told all he knew.

In the course of these raids there were for the police many unlucky accidents. There was a raid, for example, on a place called the Webster House on Third Avenue. Some thirty or forty taxpayers in the neighborhood had in a petition "humbly prayed "the police captain of the precinct, Captain Gannon, to suppress the joint, on the ground that their property was being injured by its proximity to the Webster House, and that their women could not go to and fro of an evening past the house without being insulted. The petitioners, failing to obtain redress from the Captain, applied to the Committee of

Fifteen. In the raid that followed Captain Gannon was surprised taking his ease in a back room of the place, and it subsequently appeared that he was an habitué of the Webster House. It is an incident that makes a picture. And Devery, in his judgments from week to week in the travesty of a court he presided over, added the finishing touches; dashed them in with a reckless security that made even his own admirers gasp. One patrolman, McManus by name, came up before him during the raids, on the charge of absence from duty without leave. The known facts in the McManus case were these. A married man, he had some years before abandoned his wife and allowed his three children to be supported for four years in a charitable institution maintained by the city. During all this time he was an officer on the force. It had been charged that he had seduced a fifteen-year-old girl, taken her from the house of her parents, and was living with her as his mistress. For this he was indicted and tried for rape and seduction by the county authorities, and on the trial the jury disagreed. Men familiar with the trials of members of the police force can read between the lines. He was tried also at Police Headquarters for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, and after the evidence was put in decision was "reserved." It was on record also that he had once been dismissed from the force for intoxication, but, without reason given, had been reinstated. Finally the Gerry Society had caused him to be arrested for failure to support his children, and the trial took place in the Court of Special Sessions at a time when Mr. Jerome happened to be presiding justice. Mr. Jerome and his associates on the bench sentenced McManus to three months in the penitentiary. It was on his release that he appeared before Devery on the charge of being absent from post without leave. He might have pleaded that his absence was unwilling and unavoidable, but he did not. He pleaded, when Devery had lost his temper and was to all seeming on the point of passing heavy sentence on him, that he had been sentenced to the penitentiary by Judge Jerome. Devery's mood changed. Two days before, Mr. Jerome, in one of his raids, had captured an especially significant check drawn to the order of and cashed by Frank Farrell, one of Devery's inti

mates and an alleged fellow-member of the gambling syndicate. "Judge Jerome," Devery mused. "This complaint is dismissed! There is a lot of little tin soldiers runnin' around this town with popguns on their shoulders, shooting them off in the streets, raising riots and degrading the community. I say it's an outrage. Judge Jerome isn't goin' to run this town if I can help it. This man here claims that he was wrongly convicted, and I believe him. It is about time a halt was called on Judge Jerome." McManus, when arraigned before Mr. Jerome and his associates, had pleaded guilty. After Devery's decision he drew his pay for the three months during which he had served the city in the penitentiary.

To rich New Yorkers and to rich men everywhere the fact is seemingly a novelty, and even a paradox, that the administration in great cities means one thing to the rich and quite another to the poor. To the rich it means, in practice, customs-house officials, lawyers, judges in the higher courts, tax-gatherers, and, in the case of the very rich, legislatures, Congressmen, and Senators. To the poor it means the policeman on the beat, the police captain in the precinct, the district leader and his heelers, and the nearest police magistrate. To the women of the rich the policeman is almost a domestic servant, to whom they can appeal for aid and protection, and in whose presence they feel a sense of safety; they appeal to him and say, "Thank you so much," with a sense of conferring a favor; and "Chief of Police" is to them the title of a vaguely conceived petty official. To the women of the poor a policeman is a sentinel of a garrison at least professedly a friendly garrisonthat has quartered itself upon the city, and holds it in subjection under military law; and the Chief of Police is a remote and awful military dignitary of undefined powers. If the sentinel is good-natured and sober, he can be appealed to in case of need with some chance that he will throw his power into the scale of justice. If he is ill-natured, or drunken, or venal, there is indeed a bare chance that an appeal to his superiors may bring him a rebuke, but more than a rebuke is scarcely to be hoped for; neighbors and friends are slow to testify against the police for obvious reasons, and all who know the

police know how difficult it is to force one of them to testify against another. I have seen the big fellows blush like girls, and wipe off the cold sweat that started to their faces, at the lies they were telling to shield a comrade-lies perfectly patent under cross-examination; but I have never seen one of them break down. And so long as the man complained of remains in authority, there is small limit to his power to be avenged on the complainant. He can take any woman on the streets into custody and charge her with "soliciting." He can take any man on the streets into custody and club him, and charge him with having been drunk and disorderly, and with having resisted an officer in the discharge of his duty. Except by mistake, such arrests and charges do not befall the rich. The rich have money with which to pay for a fight; the rich have money with which to bring witnesses to their social position, and to bring bondsmen to give bail for them; and at the first credible intimation that a mistake has been made about the wealth and social position of a prisoner, the police are all apologies, contrition, and courtesy. The poor have no money with which to pay for a fight, or to bring witnesses, or to indemnify bondsmen; and their witnesses, who would gladly come forward on a guarantee of impunity, cannot afford, on penalty of sheer hunger, to miss a day's work, and cannot afford, on grounds of personal safety, to appear against an accusing policeman. Even when the policeman's immediate superiors are honest, the poor had better, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, in wisdom for themselves, submit than fight; and they do submit. When the policeman's superiors, as in New York City, are, as a rule, more corrupt and brutal than himself, the case of the poor is little short of desperate. Gamblers, the keepers of dives and brothels, criminals generally, have ready money and pay it, and are relatively safe. The poor are safe only in so far as they are inconspicuous; and known savings, for example, or a strikingly handsome wife or daughter, suffice to render them conspicuous. Wellworn instances of Roman or Italian tyranny are re-enacted in New York with variations; the old materials of tragic drama lie ready to the playwright's hand. No one who knows anything of the extent

to which the privilege of theft and robbery is a matter of bargain and sale, and anything of the extent to which the "cadet system" has prevailed, will find these statements exaggerated. The hunting of John Doe did not achieve its ostensible

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purpose; William Devery and his allies and lieutenants were still at large and still bore sway; but it made apparent in some measure to the well-to-do the nature and the abuses, possible and actual, of the power of the police.

Sir William Harcourt'

By Justin

VERY friend and admirer of Sir William Harcourt must have been glad when it was made known that the late leader of the Liberal party in the House of Commons had declined to accept the King's offer of a peerage and was determined to remain in that representative chamber where he had made his political name and won his place of command. Sir William Harcourt would have been thrown away in the House of Lords. He could not have done anything to arouse that apathetic chamber to anything like living importance in the affairs of state, and the House of Commons would have lost its most impressive figure. Sir William Harcourt's political fame was made in the House of Commons, and he is even yet its most distinguished member. I say "even yet" because Harcourt is growing old, and has passed that age of threescore years and ten authoritatively set down as the allotted space of man's life. But he shows no appearance as yet of old age, seems full of energy and vital power, and is as well able to command the listening House of Commons by argumentative speech and impressive declamation as he was twenty years ago.

Harcourt's bearing is one of superabundant physical resources, and he has a voice of resonant tone which imposes no tax on the listening powers of the stranger in the farthest gallery. He is a very tall man, would be one of the tallest men in any political assembly, and his presence is stately and commanding. After Gladstone's death he became the leader of the Liberal party in the House of Commons, and he resigned that posi

This article is the seventh of a series about living British statesmen. In preceding articles Mr. McCarthy has written of Mr. Balfour, Lord Salisbury, Mr. John

Morley, Mr. Henry Labouchere, the Earl of Aberdeen, and Mr. James Bryce. Other subjects will be Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Mr. John Burns, and Mr. John E, Redmond,

McCarthy

tion only because he could not cordially accept the policy and plans of action undertaken by his leader in the House of Lords, Lord Rosebery. I do not propose to enter at any length into the differences of opinion which separated these two men, but it was generally understood that Lord Rosebery did not see his way to carry out Gladstone's policy for the maintenance of Greece and the Christian populations generally against the blood-stained domination of the Ottoman power in the southeast of Europe. The result of these differences was that Lord Rosebery applied himself to form a Liberal party of his own, which should be what is called Imperialist in its policy, and that Harcourt became merely a member of the Liberal opposition in the House of Commons. To have won the place of Liberal leader in the representative chamber might well have satisfied the ambition of any man, and to withdraw from that place rather than contribute to any further disagreement in the party did not in any sense detract from Harcourt's influence and fame.

Sir William Harcourt won his earliest distinctions in law and literature rather than in politics. He comes of a family which has a history of its own and had members who won reputation during many generations. He was educated at Cambridge University and obtained high honors there. He was called to the bar in 1854, and became Queen's Counsel in 1866. In the meantime he had accomplished some important literary work. He was a writer for the "Saturday Review," then at the zenith of its reputation, and under the title of "Historicus" he contributed a series of letters on important public subjects to the "Times" newspaper which attracted universal attention, were afterwards collected and published

in a volume, and found readers in every part of the world where men take interest in the public life of England. He was a leading advocate in some legal causes which excited the profound attention of the whole country, and was already regarded as a man of mark, who might be safely assumed to have a successful career before him. It was generally taken for granted at the time that such a man was certain to seek and find a place in the House of Commons, which of course offers an opening for rising legal advocates as well as for rising politicians. I can remember quite distinctly that to all of us who were watching the careers of promising men it appeared quite certain that Harcourt was not likely to content himself with professional distinction, and that when he entered the House of Commons he would devote himself for the most part to the business of political life. He made one unsuccessful attempt to obtain a seat in the House of Commons as representative of a Scottish constituency, and was more fortunate in his second endeavor, when he was elected to Parliament by the city of Oxford as a Liberal in 1868. Then for a while I personally lost sight of him, for towards the close of that year I began a length ened visit to the United States, and only learned through the newspapers that he was already winning marked distinction as a Parliamentary debater. When I returned to England in 1871, I found that Harcourt was already regarded as certain to hold high office in a Liberal administration. His first step in that direction was to obtain the office of SolicitorGeneral in Gladstone's Government.

A story was told of Harcourt at the time-this was in 1873-which I believe to be authentic and is worth repeating. Up to this time he was merely Mr. William Vernon Harcourt, but the usage in Parliamentary life is that the leading law officers of the Crown, the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General, shall receive the honor of knighthood. It was therefore a matter of course that Mr. Harcourt should become Sir William Harcourt, and bear the title by which he is still known everywhere. The story goes, however, that Harcourt was not much delighted with the offer of a distinction which is commonly conferred upon the mayors of

English cities and towns and other such personages of municipal position. Harcourt, as I have said, came of a distinguished English family which had contributed Lord Chancellors and other such exalted dignitaries to the business of the State.

He probably had also in his mind the fact that rising men in his own profession who happened to be sons of Peers were specially exempted by constitutional usage from the necessity of putting up with knighthood when accepting one of the two legal offices under the Crown. The manner in which this very fact proclaimed the comparative insignificance of the title may have still further influenced Harcourt's objections. Anyhow, he did endeavor to impress upon Gladstone his claim to be exempted from the proffered dignity. Gladstone, however, assured him that it was the recognized constitutional practice to confer a knighthood upon a new Solicitor-General, and that there was no reason why Harcourt should seek dispensation from the honor. "Then," demanded Harcourt-so at least the story is told-" why don't you confer knighthoods on all the members of your Cabinet, and see how some of them would receive the proposition?" I cannot vouch for this story as historical truth, but I can vouch for the fact that it was told everywhere at the time, and received, so far as I know, no contradiction.

Harcourt made his way almost at once to the front rank of Parliamentary debaters. His style was somewhat rhetorical and declamatory, but it was distinctly argumentative, and his speeches contained few passages of mere declamation. He was a hard hitter, one of the hardest in the House, but he hit straight from the shoulder and never gave an unfair blow. He was often very happy in his sarcastic touches, and there was a certain robust and self-satisfied good humor even in his severest attacks on his Parliamentary opponents. The general impression of observers at first was that Harcourt would go in merely for the reputation of a powerful debater in the House of Commons, and would not show any ambition for the steady and severe work of Ministerial office. The public had yet to learn that the highest reputation of the man was to be made by his success as the head of a great Ministerial department. Many

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