Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/282

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were so great that when they took their belts off and hung them up in those resorts where they accepted the hospitality of a midnight meal, the belts seemed to be as large as the hoops of the Heidelberg tun. We rid the force of these as quickly as it could be done, and the recruits who replaced them were, because of Dr. Donnelly's care and service, superb young fellows, lithe and clean, who bore themselves with self respect and an ardent pride in that esprit de corps we were enabled to develop.

But before that spirit could exist there were defects other than physical that must be removed; there were old jealousies and animosities, some of a religious, or rather a theological nature—relic of an old warfare between the sects that once devastated the town with its unreasoning and remorseless and ignorant hatred; a St. Patrick's day had once been celebrated by dismissing a score or more of Irishmen from the police department. There were other differences of race origin, and in doing away with all these, so far as it could be done, Mr. Mooney, the Director of Public Safety, had to his assistance the ability and the tact of two crusted old characters on the force, one of them the Chief of Police, Perry D. Knapp, and the other Inspector John Carew, whose hair had so whitened in the days he served the city as a detective that he was called Silver Jack. He was one of the ablest detectives anywhere, though prejudice and jealousy had kept him down for a long time. I had known him in my youth, and later in the courts, and now that I had the chance I put him at the head of the detective department, and