of public
affairs--their city's affairs, to be exact. We are so wise in America,
so interested in our fellowman, so regardful of his welfare. They were
so small in number, however, that they were little more than an object
of pleasant jest, useful for that purpose alone.

This club, however, continued to put up its candidate until about 1895,
when suddenly it succeeded in polling the very modest number of
fifty-four votes--double the number it had succeeded in polling any
previous year. A year later one hundred and thirty-six were registered,
and the next year six hundred. Then suddenly the mayor who won that
year's battle died, and a special election was called. Here the club
polled six hundred and one, a total and astonishing gain of one. In 1898
the perennial candidate was again nominated and received fifteen
hundred, and in 1899, when he ran again, twenty-three hundred votes,
which elected him.

If this fact be registered casually here, it was not so regarded in that
typically New England mill town. Ever study New England--its Puritan,
self-defensive, but unintellectual and selfish psychology? Although this
poor little snip of a mayor was only elected for one year, men paused
astounded, those who had not voted for him, and several of the older
conventional political and religious order, wedded to their church and
all the routine of the average puritanic mill town, actually cried. No
one knew, of course, who the new mayor was, or what he stood for. There
were open assertions that the club behind him was anarchistic--that
ever-ready charge against anything new in America--and that the courts
should be called upon to prevent his being seated. And this from people
who were as poorly "off" commercially and socially as any might well be.
It was stated, as proving the worst, that he was, or had been, a mill
worker!--and, before that a grocery clerk--both at twelve a week, or
less!! Immediate division of property, the forcing of all employers to
pay as much as five a day to every laborer (an unheard-of sum in New
England), and general constraint and subversion of individual rights
(things then unknown in America, of course), loomed in the minds of
these conventional Americans as the natural and immediate result of so
modest a victory. The old-time politicians and corporations who
understood much better what the point was, the significance of this
straw, were more or less disgruntled, but satisfied that it could be
undone