consciousness that they have a big, warm-hearted friend at court who will stand by them in an emergency. The
sense of just dealing comes apparently much later than the desire for protection and indulgence. On the whole,
the gifts and favors are taken quite simply as an evidence of genuine loving-kindness. The alderman is really
elected because he is a good friend and neighbor. He is corrupt, of course, but he is not elected because he is
corrupt, but rather in spite of it. His standard suits his constituents. He exemplifies and exaggerates the
popular type of a good man. He has attained what his constituents secretly long for.
At one end of the ward there is a street of good houses, familiarly called "Con Row." The term is perhaps
quite unjustly used, but it is nevertheless universally applied, because many of these houses are occupied by
professional office holders. This row is supposed to form a happy hunting-ground of the successful politician,
where he can live in prosperity, and still maintain his vote and influence in the ward. It would be difficult to
justly estimate the influence which this group of successful, prominent men, including the alderman who lives
there, have had upon the ideals of the youth in the vicinity. The path which leads to riches and success, to
civic prominence and honor, is the path of political corruption. We might compare this to the path laid out by
Benjamin Franklin, who also secured all of these things, but told young men that they could be obtained only
by strenuous effort and frugal living, by the cultivation of the mind, and the holding fast to righteousness; or,
again, we might compare it to the ideals which were held up to the American youth fifty years ago, lower, to
be sure, than the revolutionary ideal, but still fine and aspiring toward honorable dealing and careful living.
They were told that the career of the self-made man was open to every American boy, if he worked hard and
saved his money, improved his mind, and followed a steady ambition. The writer remembers that when she
was ten years old, the village schoolmaster told his little flock, without any mitigating clauses, that Jay Gould
had laid the foundation of his colossal fortune by always saving bits of string, and that, as a result, every child
in the village assiduously collected party-colored balls of twine. A bright Chicago boy might well draw the
inference that the path of the corrupt politician not only leads to civic honors, but to the glories of benevolence
and philanthropy. This lowering of standards, this setting of an ideal, is perhaps the worst of the situation, for,
as we said in the first chapter, we determine ideals by our daily actions and decisions not only for ourselves,
but largely for each other.
We are all involved in this political corruption, and as members of the community stand indicted. This is the
penalty of a democracy,--that we are bound to move forward or retrograde together. None of us can stand
aside; our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe the same air.
That the alderman has much to do with setting the standard of life and desirable prosperity may be illustrated
by the following incident: During one of the campaigns a clever cartoonist drew a poster representing the
successful alderman in portraiture drinking champagne at a table loaded with pretentious dishes and
surrounded by other revellers. In contradistinction was his opponent, a bricklayer, who sat upon a
half-finished wall, eating a meagre dinner from a workingman's dinner-pail, and the passer-by was asked
which type of representative he preferred, the presumption being that at least in a workingman's district the
bricklayer would come out ahead. To the chagrin of the reformers, however, it was gradually discovered that,
in the popular mind, a man who laid bricks and wore overalls was not nearly so desirable for an alderman as
the man who drank champagne and wore a diamond in his shirt front. The district wished its representative "to
stand up with the best of them," and certainly some of the constituents would have been ashamed to have been
represented by a bricklayer. It is part of that general desire to appear well, the optimistic and thoroughly
American belief, that even if a man is working with his hands to-day, he and his children will quite likely be
in a better position in the swift coming to-morrow, and there is no need of being too closely associated with
common working people. There is an honest absence of class consciousness, and a naïve belief that the kind
of occupation quite largely determines social position. This is doubtless exaggerated in a neighborhood of
foreign people by the fact that as each nationality becomes more adapted to American conditions, the scale of
its occupation rises. Fifty years ago in America "a Dutchman" was used as a term of reproach, meaning a man
whose language was not understood, and who performed menial tasks, digging sewers and building railroad
embankments. Later the Irish did the same work in the community, but as quickly as possible handed it on to
the Italians, to whom the name "dago" is said to cling as a result of the digging which the Irishman resigned to
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