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into various countries, told, because the first thing that impressed them when they went out was the suffering, poverty and oppression of the people. They made a conclusion, based upon their religious convictions, that if they would accept the whole principle of Christianity there would be a great change. But they came bringing with them clothing, food, hospitals, doctors and finally schools. Of course they perhaps represented what was then the naive attachment to the idea that education would save everybody. You just had to teach them to read and write.

At any rate I, and I expect all this generation of mine, finally emerged out of college and one experience or another with a feeling that we ought to do something about it. I remember the deep excitement I felt on reading, I suppose, Theodore Roosevelt's first message to Congress - it may have been his second - after he had become President. I remember reading it in great excitement and saying, “This is it. This is constructive. This is what can be done.” As I recall, I went and looked it up later to see why I had been so moved by it at the time. It seems rather passive now, but he'd recognized that poverty was something and was everybody's business.

Theodore Roosevelt knew Jacob Riis very well. When Theodore Roosevelt was police commissioner, Jacob Riis was