Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/237

 poor soul whose husband was in the penitentiary. She came to me in a despair that was almost frantic, and showed me a letter she had received from her husband. A new governor had been elected in that state wherein he was imprisoned, and he urged his wife, in the letter she gave me to read, to secure a pardon for him before the new governor was inaugurated. "They say," he wrote, "that the new governor is a good church member, which is a bad sign for being good to prisoners."

Poor soul! It was impossible to explain to her that I was wholly powerless. She stood and humbly shook her sorrowful head, and to each new attempt at explanation she said:

"You are the father of all."

It was a phrase which most of the women of the foreign born population employed; they repeated it as though it were some charmed formula. This exaggerated notion of the mayoral power was not confined to those citizens of the foreign quarters; it was shared by many of the native Americans, who held the mayor responsible for all the vices of the community, and I was never more sharply criticized than when, in refusing to sanction the enactment of a curfew ordinance, I tentatively advanced the suggestion that, if it did not seem too outrageously radical, the rearing and training of children was the duty, not so much of the police as of parents, pastors and teachers.

It may have been because, in some way, it had got abroad that I was a reformer myself. It was at a time when there was new and searching inquiry, and