y give to no other ambition. We
can all remember that the earliest strivings of our childhood were in
this direction, and that we venerated grown people because they had
attained perfection.

Primitive people, such as the South Italian peasants, are still in this
stage. They want to be good, and deep down in their hearts they admire
nothing so much as the good man. Abstract virtues are too difficult for
their untrained minds to apprehend, and many of them are still simple
enough to believe that power and wealth come only to good people.

The successful candidate, then, must be a good man according to the
morality of his constituents. He must not attempt to hold up too high a
standard, nor must he attempt to reform or change their standards. His
safety lies in doing on a large scale the good deeds which his
constituents are able to do only on a small scale. If he believes what
they believe and does what they are all cherishing a secret ambition to
do, he will dazzle them by his success and win their confidence. There
is a certain wisdom in this course. There is a common sense in the mass
of men which cannot be neglected with impunity, just as there is sure to
be an eccentricity in the differing and reforming individual which it is
perhaps well to challenge.

The constant kindness of the poor to each other was pointed out in a
previous chapter, and that they unfailingly respond to the need and
distresses of their poorer neighbors even when in danger of bankruptcy
themselves. The kindness which a poor man shows his distressed neighbor
is doubtless heightened by the consciousness that he himself may be in
distress next week; he therefore stands by his friend when he gets too
drunk to take care of himself, when he loses his wife or child, when he
is evicted for non-payment of rent, when he is arrested for a petty
crime. It seems to such a man entirely fitting that his alderman should
do the same thing on a larger scale--that he should help a constituent
out of trouble, merely because he is in trouble, irrespective of the
justice involved.

The alderman therefore bails out his constituents when they are
arrested, or says a good word to the police justice when they appear
before him for trial, uses his pull with the magistrate when they are
likely to be fined for a civil misdemeanor, or sees what he can do to
"fix up matters" with the state's attorney when the charge is really a
serious one, and in doing this he follows th