Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/228



I went into the mayor's office, as I said, all unprepared. My equipment was what the observations of a political reporter, a young lawyer's participation in the politics of his state, and an intimacy with Golden Rule Jones could make it. It was not much, though it was as much perhaps as have most men who become municipal officials in our land, where in all branches of the civil service, training and experience, when they are considered at all, seem to be the last requisites. The condition I suppose is implicit in democracy, which has the defects of its own virtues, and founds its institutions in distrust. They order these things better in Germany, by committing the administration of municipal affairs to trained men as to a learned profession, though the German cities have the disadvantage of having so reformed their civil service that it is a monstrous bureaucracy. I had been chosen chiefly because I had been the friend of my distinguished predecessor, and for a long time I was so inveterately referred to as of that honored relation, so invariably introduced as the successor of Golden Rule Jones, that I was haunted by the disquieting dread that I was expected to be, if not a replica of him, at least some sort of measurable imitation of his manners and methods, the most impossible achievement in the world, since his was a personality wholly original and unique. And then besides, a man prefers to be himself. But of all those, and they were many