Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| me. I remember particularly one such occasion when I sat on the edge of the bed in his room at the hotel—he had come down to New York to review a militia regiment—while he was shaving himself at the window. I had gone all over the case and told him of my perplexity, when he took it up, and between bubbles of soap he blew at me he made clear what had been dim before, until I marveled that I had not seen it. |
| There came at last an occasion when nobody could decide. It was the factory law again that was in question—the enforcement of it, that is to say. The claim was made that it was not enforced as it should be. The factory inspectors said they did their best. The registering alone of all the tenement-house workers, as the new law demanded, in a population of over two millions of souls with few enough of their tenements free from the stamp of the sweat-shop, was a big enough task to leave a margin for honest intentions even with poor results. But the Governor was not content to give his inspectors the benefit of the doubt. He wrote to me to get together two or three of the dissatisfied, a list of disputed houses, and |