Any man engaged in this particular type of militant and practical reform movement was soon made to feel that he had better not undertake to push matters home unless his own character was unassailable.

On one of the investigating committees on which I served there was a countryman, a very able man, who, when he reached New York City, felt as certain Americans do when they go to Paris--that the moral restraints of his native place no longer applied.

With all his ability, he was not shrewd enough to realize that the Police Department was having him as well as the rest of us carefully shadowed.

He was caught red-handed by a plain-clothes man doing what he had no business to do; and from that time on he dared not act save as those who held his secret permitted him to act.

Thenceforth those officials who stood behind the Police Department had one man on the committee on whom they could count.
I never saw terror more ghastly on a strong man's face than on the face of this man on one or two occasions when he feared that events in the committee might take such a course as to force him into a position where his colleagues would expose him even if the city officials did not.
However, he escaped, for we were never able to get the kind of proof which would warrant our asking for the action in which this man could not have joined.
Traps were set for more than one of us, and if we had walked into these traps our public careers would have ended, at least so far as following them under the conditions which alone make it worth while to be in public life at all.