Slowly the force of Riis’s newspaper articles made headway. One by one the rooms were closed. The Committee on Vagrancy was formed, of which Riis was a member; and the same year Theodore Roosevelt, later to be President of the United States, was appointed Police Commissioner. That was the end. The reform was accomplished. For the deserving poor, decent quarters were provided; the professional vagrants left the city. In the gloom and dirt of the crowded tenements the souls of little children were shrunk and dwarfed. Riis was their crusader. Through his paper he appealed for flowers—flowers from those who came each day to the city from the country; flowers for “sad little eyes in crowded tenements, where the summer sunshine means disease and death, not play or vacation; that will close without ever having looked upon a field of daisies.” And the flowers came. Express wagons filled with them crowded Mulberry Street; people brought them in great armfuls. Little children, slovenly women, and rough men smiled and were glad. Riis brought God’s country to Mulberry Street. Then he turned his attention to the problem of child labor in the “East Factories” of New York. Only children over fourteen could be employed. But as there was no birth-registry, it could not be proved that thousands of little children quite evidently years under age were working there. Riis studied the problem. He found that certain teeth do not appear until the child is fourteen. He went to the factories and examined the children’s teeth. His case was proved. With such evidence a committee was appointed and a correction of the wrong was begun. “The Public School is the corner-stone of our liberties.” The public schools of New York were crowded, the buildings were old, unsanitary, badly lighted, and many were actually dangerous fire-traps; dark basements were used for playgrounds. There was in the whole city but one school with an outdoor playground. Worse yet, there were thousands of children who did not go to school at all, and of those who did, conditions made truants of many. Riis enlisted for this new battle. He took photographs, and gave lectures showing slides made from his photographs, and he wrote constantly in the newspaper. Slowly the playgrounds came, and modern school-buildings more adequate to house the city’s youth. It is an endless list of public-service activities. Instigated by this foreign-born American, the reform of the greatest American city was begun and carried far along its way. Unfit tenements were torn down, parks and playgrounds were established, the whole school-system was remodeled, the old over-crowded prison was condemned and a modern one erected, the civil courts were overhauled; there was no end to his warfare on conditions which brought death and misery to the city’s poor.