Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/283

 when I was tired of the troubles which harassed him and me during the day, I tried sometimes to forget them at night by writing stories in which he figured as the clever detective he was.

And as for Perry Knapp, I suppose there was not another chief of police like him anywhere. Over his desk was a picture of Walt Whitman, and in his heart was the love for humanity that Whitman had, and in his library were well read copies of Emerson and a collection of Lincolniana I have often envied him. He had served in close association with Jones, who had made his position difficult by promoting him over the heads of others in the department who ranked him, and he was the heir of all the old dis-*trust of Jones's attitude toward life. Nevertheless, he found a way to apply Jones's theories to the policing of a city without any of that ostentation which in some cases has brought such methods into disfavor. I cannot, of course, describe his whole method, but he was always trying to help people and not to hurt them. He established a system by which drunken men were no longer arrested, but, when they could not be taken home as were those club members with whom he tried in that respect at least to put them on a parity, they were cared for at police headquarters until morning, and then with a bath and a breakfast, allowed to go without leaving behind to dog their footsteps that most dreadful of all fates, a "police record." No one will ever know how many poor girls picked up in police raids he saved from the life to which they had been tempted or driven, by sending them back to their homes when