Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/349

 the slightest sympathy, to which I could never yield the slightest acquiescence. What good, though all the poor and miserable servitors of privilege were put in prison, while privilege itself remained? Such clamors have had their results; a few more broken lives, a little more sorrow and shame in the world, and the clamor ceases, and things go on the same as before.

It is this instability, this variableness, this weariness of the public mind, on which privilege depends, with a cynical trust so often justified that it might breed cynicism in all observant and reflective natures. The street railway proprietors in Toledo expected each election to demonstrate this weariness in the people, and to restore them to, or at least confirm them in, the privileges they had enjoyed under the old régime.

For a people to assume and for a decade consistently to maintain an attitude toward a public question therefore was a triumph of the democratic principle. That is what the people of Cleveland did; that is what the people of Detroit did; that is what the people of Toledo did. The successive stages of this process were most interesting to observe, the more especially since they caught in the movement even some of the street railway group and its political confreres themselves.

In its origin the public will was destructive no doubt, that was the inarticulate disgust born of the long endurance of inadequate service, all the miseries of that contemptuous exploitation of the people so familiar in all the cities of America. To