Page:The Shame of the Cities.djvu/250

 second-class business man.” Standing about five feet high, he knows he is no taller; but he knows that that is tall enough. Cole is a fighter. Nobody discovered it, perhaps, till he was past his fiftieth year. Then one Martin B. Madden found it out. Madden, a prominent citizen, president of the Western Stone Company, and a man of tremendous political power, was one of the business men who went into the Council to bring order out of the chaos of corruption. He was a Yerkes leader. Madden lived in Cole’s ward. His house was in sight of Cole’s house. “The sight of it made me hot,” said Cole, “for I knew what it represented.” Cole had set out to defeat Madden, and he made a campaign which attracted the attention of the whole town. Madden was re-elected, but Cole had proved himself, and that was what made Lyman J. Gage say that Cole was “just the man.”

“You come to me as a Hobson’s choice,” said Mr. Cole to the committee, “as a sort of forlorn hope. All right,” he added, “as a last chance, I’ll take it.”

Cole went out to make up the Nine. He chose William H. Colvin, a wealthy business man, retired; Edwin Burritt Smith, publicist and lawyer; M. J. Carroll, ex-labor leader, ex-typesetter, an editorial writer on a trade journal; Frank Wells, 242a