Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/222

 *nomic, or any other interpretation of history, or through initiatives, referendums and recalls. What good would any of these cold and precise formulæ do them? Better perhaps the turkey at Thanksgiving, and the goose at Christmas time which the old machine councilman from the ward gave them; of course they themselves paid for them, but they did not know it, and the councilman did not know it; he had bestowed them with the voice of kindness, in the same hearty human spirit in which he came to the wedding or the wake, or got the father a job, or the oldest son a parole from the workhouse, and rendered a thousand other little personal services. Perhaps Bath House John and Hinky Dink were more nearly right after all than the cold and formal and precise gentleman who denounced their records in the council. For they were human, and the great problem is to make the government of a city human.

There were many, of course, even in our own movement, who were not concerned about that; I was strongly rebuked by one of them once in that very first campaign for declaring that we were no better than anyone else, and that all the "good" men of the world could not do the people much good even if they were elected to the city government for life. No, we may have efficient governments in our cities, and honest governments, as we are beginning to have everywhere, and, happily, are more and more to have, but the great emancipations will not come through the formulæ of Independents, Socialists, or single-taxers, nor through Law and Order Leagues,