nd that of
a maker of cigars. He knew every cranny of Montreal as intimately as the
late John Ross Robertson used to know Toronto. Mr. Ames' knowledge of
the big town was fairly complete. But if Mr. Ames and Mr. Lighthall, the
genie of civic information in Montreal, could have been one two-headed
man, they never could have matched Lapointe in the expert business of
knowing where to plant a man to give him a civic job or how to create a
job to suit a man in need of it.

Yet for eight consecutive years Mr. Ames with no other desire than to do
his duty, to study Montreal, and perhaps qualify for larger service
later, remained a member of the City Council. And he did his work there
before the English-speaking element undertook to clean up the city--the
most genial, sarcastic failure of modern times. He wrote little books
about Montreal. He mastered French by studying it first-hand in France.
Those who used to listen to his evangelical speeches in his own tongue
sometimes wished he had learned a few nuances and inflexions in English.
He was for some time Chairman of the Municipal Board of Health, in a city
where infant mortality is such a constant epidemic that babies' coffins
are displayed in shop windows. In 1907 he wrote a tractate on the
housing of the working classes, just on the eve of the period when
Montreal began to be the worst city in America for high rents,
extortionate charges for moving and intolerable congestion. The
publication of his views on the subject, however, showed that he had the
courage to point out what was wrong, even though he had no concrete
constructive proposal which any municipal government in Montreal or any
Legislature in Quebec would ever accept as a working basis for putting
the thing right. As far back as 1901 he indited a treatise on The City
Problem, What Is It? Twenty years later, after all Mr. Ames' burnings on
the subject, Montreal has slumped back into sheer mediaevalism in civic
government under the wheedling despotism of Mederic Martin, who presided
at the public funeral of the only effort the city ever made to establish
a real business administration. In that Quixotic eruption of public
virtue in 1912, Mr. Ames, after all his publicity on the subject of
redeeming Montreal, was not even considered as a candidate for the Board
of Control.

On the whole scarcely a public man, or even a reforming editor, in Canada
has talked so consistently and so cheerfully for so long a