Part of the force of 232 troopers organized under the supervision of Major George Fletcher Chandler for the protection of the rural districts of New York State

You will be connected at once with the nearest headquarters of a detachment of the new State Troopers. You will find a sympathetic listener on the other end of the telephone, no matter how trivial the trouble or unfounded the alarm. And if it is a case where the actual presence of the Arm of the Law is required, in a surprisingly short time one or a dozen or twenty of the "men on horseback" will be at the place where they are needed.

If you have had no previous contact with the State Troopers, your first emotion, after that of relief, will be surprise at their youth. Next you will be impressed with their poise, and if you have occasion to have more than a casual contact with them, you will soon find yourself rather marveling at their wisdom. And whatever the trouble, you can be assured that the limits of human endeavor will be stretched in the effort to set things to rights. For the New York State Troopers, under the command of Major George Fletcher Chandler, Superintendent of the Department of State Police, have set for themselves a standard of conduct and efficiency to attain which there is no other method but to try to do somewhat better than absolute best. That standard, the ideal that is held up by Major Chandler as the goal for which his men are to strive, is to be just a little bit keener, a little bit more efficient, of a wee bit more service than the Royal Canadian Northwestern Mounted Police and the Pennsylvania State Constabulary rolled into one.

The corps of New York State Troopers is only a trifle more than six months old as this is written. It will be hardly more than three

months, by the time this is read, since the corps was fully organized, equipped, and first engaged in active duty. It is far too early in their career to say how closely they are approaching the lofty standard of conduct, of character, of loyalty and intelligent devotion to duty thus set for them. They are not yet "blooded." They have still to undergo the baptism of fire that is the supreme test to which any organization such as this must be put before it can be said of it that it measures up to what it has hoped to be. But if high purposes, painstaking picking of its personnel without fear or favor or political pressure, rigid discipline, enthusiastic and inspiring leadership, and the knowledge that if it is to succeed at all it must under no circumstances ever be anything more or less than exactly right-if these things can bring an organization up to this standard, then the New York State Troopers have come to stay, for those are the conditions and that the atmosphere under which this sane yet radical experiment for the solution of the problem of the control of rural crime has been undertaken by the state of New York.

Already the State Troopers are making their presence felt, and winning the sympathetic support of groups and classes that were indifferent, or opposed to their establishment. Their activities, even thus early in their brief career as an organization, have been many and varied. They have ranged all the way from rounding up violators of the automobile laws on the state highways to quarantining an Indian Reservation for smallpox, and have included such items as restoring lost children to their parents, directing strayed aviators back to Canada, raiding gambling houses and 'speak-easies," recovering stolen property of various kinds, including automobiles and Shetland ponies, and controlling traffic at state and county fairs and the approaches to military camps. For a force of 232 men, all

new to this kind of service, to cover a territory stretching a good 500 miles from Montauk Point to Niagara Falls, and more than 300 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the St. Lawrence, a territory about equally divided between rugged mountains and wild forests on the one hand and thickly settled farming country on the other, is a big job. Nobody appreciates how big a job it is, better than Major Chandler and his staff—and nobody is less inclined to make a fuss over it or to regard it as anything more than a man-sized job, to be tackled with confidence and without boasting. You can't get anything but civility, courtesy, and the most modest and sketchy statement of what has been done, out of the State Troopers or any of the officers. You can't get one of them to talk about what they expect to do. But you can't talk with any of them for more than a minute or two without gaining the profound conviction that whatever is expected of them is what ultimately they are going to do that and a little bit more.

THE NEED OF THEM

"But why does rural New York need policing?" you ask. "Isn't it accepted and traditional that the cities are the breeding places and centres of crime, and the country districts the abode of all that is pure and peaceful?" Traditional, yes; but actually, as a matter of cold-blooded record, the proportion of crimes unpunished and of criminals of justice unwhipped in the rural regions of New York is far greater than in the cities. And it was one of the many hundreds of such unpunished crimes that inspired two women with righteous indignation and the determination to do something to prevent a repetition of such crimesan inspiration that led directly up to the establishment of the New York State Troopers. The two women were Miss M. Moyca Newell and Miss Katherine Mayo. They are women of means and they are also women of imagination and courage. Miss Newell's country home at Bedford Hills is one of the most attractive of Westchester County's magnificent country seats. It was in the building of this house that the tragedy occurred-the assassination of the superintendent of construction-that led these two women to undertake what others perhaps had thought of, but which no one else had successfully undertaken. Let me tell of the murder of Sam Howell, the young man to whose memory the New York State Troopers

may be said to be a monument, in Miss Mayo's own words, because the story as she tells it so perfectly illuminates the conditions that, in large measure, made the need of a State Troopers an imperative one:

THE CASE OF SAM HOWELL

"Samuel Howell was an Iowan farmer's son. By industry, intelligence, and honest dealing he had worked himself up through the carpentry trade to the place of builders' foreman. On the day of his death he had charge of an important piece of construction in a rural part of the state of New York.

"Early one Saturday morning, on his way to his work, Howell was ambushed by four men who demanded the week's pay-roll. The four brandished revolvers. Howell was alone and unarmed. But, no matter what the odds, it was impossible to that boy to surrender a charge. So he drove his motorcycle straight through the gang, who emptied their revolvers into his body from a distance of two paces.

"Bleeding from seven mortal wounds, Howell guided his machine over a thousand yards of rough road, to the construction site. There he kept grip on his consciousness until he had turned over the heavy pay-roll to a responsible man; until he had made careful record, for his successor's use, of certain structural weaknesses in the work that he alone knew and that otherwise might be neglected; and until, by name and by number, he had positively identified two of his murderers as laborers who had been employed for a month on the job. Then he collapsed. Three days later he died.

"A clearer case of identification, an easier case to handle, will never occur in the history of crime. Both of the identified men were Italians. One, a character well known in the region as well as to every man on the construction, had red hair, a conspicuous scar on his cheek, and a pock-marked skin. All four spent some hours, and in all likelihood the entire day, lying in a small islet of woods surrounded by open fields, practically on the scene of their crime. But no attempt was made to arrest them throughout that day. No bar was put in the way of their escape. And up to the present moment no punishment has been visited upon any one of them.

"This statement I make without qualification, for the reason that I spent the entire day of the murder on the spot, and was

personally cognizant of all that was done and left undone.

"I saw the complete breakdown of the sheriff-constable system. Both county sheriff and village constables, present on the scene, proved utterly unrelated to the emergency, and for reasons perfectly clear. I saw the group of twenty or more union workmen, encircled by twice their number of unskilled helpers, standing with hands down. And I heard those Union men refuse even to surround the islet of woods, a thousand yards distant, in which the murderers of their comrade were hiding.

"We earn our living on country jobs, among men like these,' said the carpenter boss, nodding toward the listening foreigners. 'Knives and guns are their playthings, and when they want me they'll get me, just as they got poor Howell. We have to think of our families. We can't afford to earn gunmen's ill-will. There is no protection in the country districts. Sheriffs and constables don't help us at all. Howell was only a working man. You'll have forgotten him in a month.'

"But it was impossible to forget. The truth is too hideous-the truth that in the great rural state of New York protection of life and property is a private luxury, to be obtained only by those rich enough to pay for itthe truth that the man carrying a dinner-pail, the farmer driving home from the store at dusk, the woman alone in an isolated homestead, are as safe and easy prey to criminal attack as if they moved in the wilds of Mexico.

“And, just as it was impossible to forget, so was it impossible to remain inactive-to remain an idle conniver in the toleration of such a disgrace."

Miss Mayo and Miss Newell did not remain inactive for a moment. They found the intelligent residents of rural New York eager to coöperate and fully alive to the need of securing in some way the safety of its citizens. The committee they formed to promote and push the project for a state police force was representative of every section of the commonwealth and of every class in society with the sole exception of organized labor, which has been consistently and persistently antagonistic from the beginning. Dr. Lewis Rutherford Morris was and is chairman of the committee. Dr. William T. Hornaday, the famous naturalist, who saw in State Troopers a possible means of preventing the slaughter of song-birds by law

less foreigners, is vice-chairman. To go any farther down the list without naming them all would be to make invidious distinctions. The brunt of the work, moreover, fell to Miss Newell and Miss Mayo, and there is not a man or woman on the whole committee who does not gladly and freely give them the full credit which they all too modestly disclaim.

Seeking precedent to justify the demand for the establishment of a state police, and experience to demonstrate the effectiveness of such an institution as the practical answer to the obvious need, Miss Mayo went to Pennsylvania and spent months in intensive study of the Pennsylvania State Police, commonly termed the "State Constabulary." Nowhere else in the United States did there exist an organization approaching in purpose or method that which had been visualized for New York. The Texas Rangers is a different type of organization, maintained for purposes which touch only at intervals conditions existing in the North. The Royal Canadian Northwestern Mounted Police comes nearer to it. But in Pennsylvania, for ten years before the murder of Sam Howell, there had existed a corps of State Police whose record for honor, courage, devotion, and unfailing efficiency as the sworn Arm of the Law had made them literally a terror to evildoers and the pride of every wellintentioned, law-abiding citizen of the commonwealth.

ACTIVITIES OF THE PENNSYLVANIA POLICE

It would be much easier to write the story of the Pennsylvania State Police, so filled is the record and chronicle of their achievements with tales that quicken the blood and stir the emotions. But it would be a difficult task, indeed, to tell that story more forcefully, more convincingly or most interestingly than Miss Mayo herself has told it in her book, “Justice to All." This was the final fruit of her study of the Pennsylvania Police, a study that yielded a huge store of ammunition for the campaign in New York. Thousands of citizens of the Empire State, who knew only vaguely of the Pennsylvania Constabulary as the successor to the old Coal and Iron Police, and who had thought of it, if they thought of it at all, as a sort of Cossackry in the hands of the mine and mill owners for the suppression of labor disturbances, learned for the first time how far ahead of their own state in the matter of affording the equal protection of the law to every citizen,