I immediately promoted him to roundsman.

He is a captain now.

He has been on the force ever since, save that when the Spanish War came he obtained a holiday without pay for six months and reentered the navy, serving as gun captain in one of the gunboats, and doing his work, as was to be expected, in first-rate fashion, especially when under fire.
Let me again say that when men tell me that the police are irredeemably bad I remember scores and hundreds of cases like this of Bourke, like the case I have already mentioned of Raphael, like the other cases I have given above.
It is useless to tell me that these men are bad.

They are naturally first-rate men.

There are no better men anywhere than the men of the New York police force; and when they go bad it is because the system is wrong, and because they are not given the chance to do the good work they can do and would rather do.