Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/274

 third time, and immediately after that election when a large majority of the people had again spoken their minds on the subject, it was considered the proper time to reopen the discussion and to hold a so-called civic revival. The young, uncultured man they brought to town to conduct that revival, could have known nothing whatever of life, and was wholly unconscious of the great economic forces which, with so much complexity and friction, were building the modern city. He came to call on me before he opened his revival that he might have, as he said, a personal, private and confidential talk. When I asked him how the city could be regenerated, he said he did not know, but this fact did not prevent him from telling the audiences he addressed that week just what should be done, and that he, for instance, could nobly do it, and in the end they sent a committee to me to tell me what to do, if not how to do it. I asked the committee to reduce their complaints to writing, to point out those evils which they considered most objectionable, and to propose means of combating them. The committee went away and I confess I did not expect to see them again because I had no notion that they could ever agree as to the particular evils, but after some weeks they had come to terms on a few heads, and filed their complaint pointing out several specific vices in town, and as a remedy proposed that they be "prevented." I replied to them in a letter in which I said all I could think of at that time or all I could think of now on this whole vexed problem. It was printed in pamphlet form and rather widely circulated, and