Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/204

 elected, I could laugh when "Dad" McCullough, the old Scotsman whom we all loved for himself and for his devotion to our movement, leaned forward in his chair, stroked his whiskers in a mollifying way and, as though he preferred even the other members of his committee not to hear him, said:

"Would it be out of place if I suggested that in the campaign you bear down as lightly as possible on the infirmities of the law?"

His shrewd sense even then warned him of the herring that would be drawn across the trail of privilege as soon as we struck it!

And he was right. We had not opened our campaign at Golden Rule Hall, before privilege did what it always does when it is pursued, it tried to divert attention from itself by pointing out a smaller evil. All the old and conventional complaints about the morals of the city to which we had been used in Jones's campaigns were revived and repeated with embellishments and improvements; no city was ever reviled as was ours by those who had failed in their efforts to control it and absorb the product of its communal toil. My attitude, conceived by "Dad" McCullough as "bearing down on the infirmities of the law," was now represented as evidence of an intention to ignore the law, to enforce none of the statutes, and it was predicted that the election of the Independent ticket meant nothing but anarchy and chaos.

To this "moral" issue that had served for so many years, the "good" people responded immediately, as they always do, and with certain