Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/235

 And government, be its form what it may, is but the reflection of all these qualities. The city, said Coriolanus, is the people, and as Jones used to say, with those strange embracing gestures, "I believe in all the people."

XXXVIII

However, all these confused elements make the task of a mayor exceedingly difficult, especially in America where there are, not so many kinds of people, but so many different standards and customs and habits. When one gets down into humanity, one beholds not two classes, separate and distinct as the sexes, but innumerable classes. In Toledo something more than twenty languages and dialects are spoken every day, and as the mayor is addressed the chorus becomes a very babel, a confusion of tongues, all counseling him to his duty. The result is apt to be perplexing at times. The rights of "business" in the streets and to the public property, the proper bounds within which strikers and strike breakers are to be confined, the limitations of the activities of pickets, the hours in which it is proper to drink beer, who in the community should gamble, whether Irishmen or Germans make the better policemen; the exact proportion of public jobs which Poles and Hungarians should hold; whether Socialists on their soap boxes are obstructing traffic or merely exercising the constitutional right of free speech, whether there are more Catholics than Protestants holding office; whether the