an achievement with more suspicion than elation. So numerous have been the failures, success comes almost as a surprise. Hundreds of tests are forthwith instituted in order to compare the new lamp with the old, in order to reveal hidden defects. Thus, when the tungsten lamp was invented, it was subjected to the most minute scrutiny before you were allowed to screw it into a socket in your house or your office.

The qualities which lamp-users consciously or unconsciously demand, and to which lampmakers must give heed, are curiously analogous to the points of a well-constructed automobile. Endurance, power, and economy-three cardinal virtues of a motor carfind their counterpart in every good illumi

nant.

To ascertain whether it has these three cardinal virtues, a new lamp is tested in several ways. One way of discovering its endurance is to burn it until it breaks down. The number of hours of its life and its candlepower are carefully noted. Second to its luminous endurance is its mechanical endur

ance. It must be able to withstand accidental knocks and blows, vibrations and falls. In order to test the strength of the glass parts, numerous bumping and thwacking engines have been devised, most of them so arranged that the lamps can be lighted, if desired, at any time during the test.

The scientific use of a completed incandescent lamp is not the only, nor indeed the most important, method employed to study its mechanical endurance. It is by the inspection of the filament removed from the bulb that perhaps the most information is obtained. Very delicate instruments must be employed for that purpose, because the filament is often of almost microscopic diameter. To ascertain the secrets of its weakness the surface or fracture of the filament is photographed with a microscope. graphed with a microscope. The resultant picture (an enlargement of several hundred diameters) shows that an exterior apparently smooth to the naked eye may in reality be curiously pitted and seamed. Then, again, refined apparatus is employed, consisting of tiny weights and levers, with electrical auxilia

ries, for measuring the strains and stresses when a filament is broken or bent.

The horse-power of an automobile finds its counterpart in the candle-power of an electric lamp. An instrument known as a photometer measures the intensity of the lamp's light. Fully equipped, a laboratory photometer may cost five hundred dollars. Only in the hands of a trained and experienced photometrician is it of any value.

Economy of current is relatively quite as important in an electric lamp as fuel economy in a motor car. Instead of being measured, however, in miles per gallon of gasoline, it is measured in what the scientist calls "lumens per watt," which, interpreted, means the amount of light delivered in proportion to the electrical power consumed.

So difficult is this problem of providing a cheap efficient light for our descendants, a light that will measurably approach the high standard set by the firefly, that it is not likely to be solved by any one man. The day of the master of all trades has passed. As college

commencement orations annually remind us, we are living in an age of specialization. No man has money enough, no man is omniscient enough, to produce unaided the light of the future. A regiment of scientists must attack the problem. In the research laboratories devoted to the task throughout the world are chemists and engineers, who search out new methods and substances for lampmaking; physicists who work mainly along advanced theoretical lines, studying the very nature and properties of light; physiologists, who specialize on the effects of light on the eye; and psychologists, who concern themselves with such nice questions as the effect of side glare. There is nothing haphazard in the studies of these men. They know exactly what is wanted; they waste no time in useless experiments. When, therefore, it comes, the light of the future will be the product of the brain concentration of two hemispheres. and of perhaps several generations-a work built up as patiently as the Egyptian pyramids.

I

N the spring of 1895 I was appointed by Mayor Strong Police Commissioner, and I served as President of the Police Commission of New York for the two following years. Mayor Strong had been elected Mayor the preceding fall, when the general antiDemocratic wave of that year coincided with one of the city's occasional insurrections of virtue and consequent turning out of Tammany from municipal control. He had been elected on a non-partisan ticket-usually (although not always) the right kind of ticket in municipal affairs, provided it represents not a bargain among factions but genuine nonpartisanship, with the genuine purpose to get the right men in control of the city government on a platform which deals with the needs of the average men and women, the men and women who work hard and who too often live hard. I was appointed with the distinct understanding that I was to administer the Police Department with entire disregard of partisan politics, and only from the standpoint of a good citizen interested in promoting the welfare of all good citizens. My task, therefore, was really simple. Mayor Strong had already offered me the Street-Cleaning Department. For this work I did not feel that I had any especial fitness. I resolutely refused to accept the position, and the Mayor ultimately got a far better man for his purpose in Colonel George F. Waring. The work of the Police Department, however, was in my line, and I was glad to undertake it.

JACOB RIIS AND "THE OTHER HALF

The man who was closest to me throughout my two years in the Police Department was Jacob Riis. By this time, as I have said, I was getting our social, industrial, and political needs into pretty fair perspective. I was

Copyright 1913 by the Outlook Company. Special Notice: This series of articles is fully protected by copyright in the United States and in England. All rights, including the right of translation into foreign languages, are reserved. This matter is not to be republished either in whole or in part without special permission of the publishers.

still ignorant of the extent to which big men of great wealth played a mischievous part in our industrial and social life, but I was well awake to the need of making ours in good faith both an economic and an industrial as well as a political democracy. I already knew Jake Riis, because his book " How the Other Half Lives" had been to me both an enlightenment and an inspiration for which I felt I could never be too grateful. Soon after it was written I had called at his office to tell him how deeply impressed I was by the book, and that I wished to help him in any practical way to try to make things a little better. I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds, of speech that does not result in action-in other words, I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching what can be practiced and then in practicing it. Jacob Riis had drawn an indictment of the things that were wrong, pitifully and dreadfully wrong, with the tenement homes and the tenement lives of our wageworkers. In his book he had pointed out how the city government, and especially those connected with the departments of police and health, could aid in remedying some of the wrongs.

WANTED: A WORKINGMAN'S MAYOR As President of the Police Board I was In also a member of the Health Board. both positions I felt that with Jacob Riis's guidance I would be able to put a goodly number of his principles into actual effect. He and I looked at life and its problems from substantially the same standpoint. Our ideals and principles and purposes, and our beliefs as to the methods necessary to realize them, were alike. After the election in 1894 I had written him a letter which ran in part as follows:

It is very important to the city to have a business man's Mayor, but it is more important to have a workingman's Mayor; and I want

Mr. Strong to be that aiso. . . . It is an excellent thing to have rapid transit, but it is a good deal more important, if you look at matters with a proper perspective, to have ample playgrounds in the poorer quarters of the city, and to take the children off the streets so as to prevent them growing up toughs. In the same way it is an admirable thing to have clean streets; indeed, it is an essential thing to have them; but it would be a better thing to have our schools large enough to give ample accommodation to all who should be pupils and to provide them with proper playgrounds.

And I added, while expressing my regret that I had not been able to accept the streetcleaning commissionership, that "I would have been delighted to smash up the corrupt contractors and put the street-cleaning force absolutely out of the domain of politics."

This was nineteen years ago, but it makes a pretty good platform in municipal politics even to-day-smash corruption, take the municipal service out of the domain of politics, insist upon having a Mayor who shall be a workingman's Mayor even more than a business man's Mayor, and devote all the attention possible to the welfare of the children.

CONCENTRATION OF POWER

Therefore, as I viewed it, there were two sides to the work: first, the actual handling of the Police Department; second, using my position to help in making the city a better place in which to live and work for those to whom the conditions of life and labor were hardest. The two problems were closely connected; for one thing never to be forgotten in striving to better the conditions of the New York police force is the connection between the standard of morals and behavior in that force and the general standard of morals and behavior in the city at large. The form of government of the Police Department at that time was such as to make it a matter of extreme difficulty to get good results. It represented that device. of old-school American political thought, the desire to establish checks and balances so elaborate that no man shall have power enough to do anything very bad.

In prac

tice this always means that no man has power enough to do anything good, and that what is bad is done anyhow.

In most positions the "division of powers theory works unmitigated mischief. The only way to get good service is to give somebody power to render it, facing the fact that power which will enable a man to do a job well will also necessarily enable him to do it

ill if he is the wrong kind of man.

What is normally needed is the concentration in the hands of one man, or of a very small body of men, of ample power to enable him or them to do the work that is necessary; and then the devising of means to hold these men fully responsible for the exercise of that power by the people. This of course means that, if the people are willing to see power misused, it will be misused. But it also means that if, as we hold, the people are fit for self-government-if, in other words, our talk and our institutions are not shams-we will get good government. I do not contend that my theory will automatically bring good government. do contend that it will enable us to get as good government as we deserve, and that the other way will not.

CHECKING EFFICIENCY

I

The then government of the Police Department was so devised as to render it most difficult to accomplish anything good, while the field for intrigue and conspiracy was limitless. There were four Commissioners, two supposed to belong to one party and two to the other, although, as a matter of fact, they never divided on party lines. There was a Chief, appointed by the Commissioners, but whom they could not remove without a regular trial subject to review by the courts of law. This Chief and any one Commissioner had power to hold up most of the acts of the other three Commissioners. It was made easy for the four Commissioners to come to a deadlock among themselves; and if this danger was avoided, it was easy for one Commissioner, by intriguing with the Chief, to bring the other three to a standstill. The Commissioners were appointed by the Mayor, but he could not remove them without the assent of the Governor, who was usually politically opposed to him. In the same way the Commissioners could appoint the patrolmen, but they could not remove them, save after a trial which went up for review to the courts.

As was inevitable under our system of law procedure, this meant that the action of the court was apt to be determined by legal technicalities. It was possible to dismiss a man from the service for quite insufficient reasons, and to provide against the reversal of the sentence, if the technicalities of procedure were observed. But the worst criminals were apt to be adroit men, against whom it was impossible to get legal evidence which a court could properly consider in a criminal trial (and the