Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/271

 Cleveland or in Cincinnati, or elsewhere for that matter, in the days of machine domination. The Puritan never lets his religion interfere with business.

I used often to recall, in those days, a witty saying of Mr. William Travers Jerome, when he was District Attorney in New York. He said he often wished that there were two volumes of the Revised Statutes, one to contain the laws enacted for human beings, and the other to embalm the moral yearnings of rural communities.

It was disturbing and discouraging, of course, to feel that out there in the community there was this shadowy mass of well intentioned people, the most of whom no doubt, in common with all the rest of us, did wish to see moral improvement, and yet so misconstrued and misinterpreted our efforts. It was saddening, too, because in the work we were trying to do we should have liked their sympathy, their interest and their support. Because of their wider opportunity of enlightenment much better and nobler things might have been demanded of them, but as Johnson Thurston one night pointed out, they did not show as much civic spirit, as much concern for the common weal as those of smaller opportunities, those bad people as they called them of whom much less would naturally have been expected. I made a rule, as I have already said somewhere in these pages, not to talk back, or to argue with them. They viewed life from the Puritan standpoint, and I suppose that I viewed it from the pagan standpoint. The sins of others and their mistakes