I am not telling you these things to rake up forgotten sins; I am trying to show you whence came the deadly apathy that was to blame for our plight. Our conscience was asleep and the Church that should have kept it awake slept, too. We cannot afford to forget it yet, for that conscience of ours is none too robust, or else it is singularly drowsy in spells. I am thinking of the time, only a little while ago, when Theodore Roosevelt was Police Commissioner in New York, and of his astonished look when churchmen, citizens from whom he should have expected support, and did expect it, for his appeal was to them direct, came to him daily to plead for “discretion” in the enforcement of the laws he was sworn to carry out. Not all of them did this—he had many strong backers among the clergy and lay-brethren—but too many. You should have been with me in those days and you would have understood what that fight was. The saloon was the enemy, and, in a single week during that struggle, it wrecked eight homes by tragedies, with which I, as a police reporter, was called to deal. I am not speaking now of the numberless tragedies that drag their slow lengths through the years, but of those that reached the acute stage in my sight that week. Four desperate wives were driven to suicide and two were murdered by drunken husbands. One aged woman was beaten to death by her beastly son when she refused him money to continue his debauch. And a policeman was killed in the street by drunken marauders. That was the showing; and it was for discretion in dealing with that enemy those people strove, calling the President of the Police Board “hasty.” They were “men of the highest character, but they failed to appreciate the responsibility” which that character imposed upon them. They called Roosevelt hasty. It was time that some one got up some speed in New York. More than a hundred years ago (to be exact, in 1797) the legislature of New York prohibited soap factories on Manhattan Island, south of Grand Street, in the interest of the public good. Within seven weeks after the order was issued, the same legislature amended its act, giving the Health Board discretion in the premises; and the biggest soap factory in the land is below Grand Street to-day. The power of soap is great.