mply a lower standard of
political incorruptibility: only that there are much greater
opportunities of going wrong.

It is interesting to note, moreover, that in the public service the
opportunities of malfeasance in public officers in Great Britain are
increasing rapidly and, moreover, in precisely those lines wherein they
have proved most demoralising in America. I have elsewhere recorded the
apprehension with which many Englishmen cannot help regarding the
closeness of the relations which are growing up between the national and
local party organisations, but in addition to this the urban public
bodies are coming to play a vastly larger role in the life of the
people, while the multiplication of electric car lines and similar
enterprises is exposing the members of those bodies to somewhat the same
class of untoward influence as has so often proven fatal to the civic
virtue of similar bodies in America. Whether, as a result, any large
number of cases of individual frailty have exposed themselves, probably
only those immediately interested know; the exposure at least has not
reached the general public.

It may not, however, be amiss to remember that a century and a half ago,
when the conditions in the two countries were widely different from what
they are to-day, Benjamin Franklin, coming to England, was shocked and
astounded at the corruption then prevalent in English public life.

* * * * *

The procedure of an American presidential campaign has been sufficiently
often described for the benefit of English readers. Suffice it to say
that it is devastating, at times almost titanic. I have had some
experience of the amenities of political campaigning in England, but the
most bitterly contested fight in England never produces anything like
the intensity of passion that is let loose in the quadrennial upheavals
in the United States.

It was my lot to be closely associated with the conduct of a national
campaign--as bitterly fought a campaign as the country has seen since
the days of the war,--namely that of 1896 when Mr. Bryan was the
candidate of the Free Silver Democracy. Early in the fight I began to
receive abusive letters, for which a large and capacious drawer was
provided in the office, into which they were tossed as they came, on the
chance of their containing some reading which might be interesting when
the trouble was over. As the fight waxed, they came by every post and in
ev