the support of one of the two national parties, but which in spite of that support has so far made little substantial progress.  Civil service reform, on the other hand, was the first agitation looking in the direction of political purification.  The early reformers believed that the eradication of the spoils system would deal a deadly blow at political corruption and professional politics.  But although they have been fairly successful in establishing the “merit” system in the various public offices, the results of the reform have not equaled the promises of its advocates.  While it is still an important part of the programme of reform from the point of view of many reformers, it has recently been over-shadowed by other issues.  It does not provoke either as much interest as it did or as much opposition.  Municipal reform has, of course, almost as many centers of agitation as there are centers of corruption—­that is, large municipalities in the United States.  It began as a series of local non-partisan movements for the enforcement of the laws, the dispossession of the “rascals,” and the businesslike, efficient administration of municipal affairs; but the reformers discovered in many cases that municipal corruption could not be eradicated without the reform of state politics, and without some drastic purging of the local public service corporations.  They have consequently in many cases enlarged the area of their agitation; but in so doing they have become divided among themselves, and their agitation has usually lost its non-partisan character.  Finally the agitation against the trusts has developed a confused hodge-podge of harmless and deadly, overlapping and mutually exclusive, remedies, which are the cause of endless disagreements.  Of course they are all for the People and against the Octopus, but beyond this precise and comprehensive statement of the issue, the reformers have endlessly different views about the nature of the disease and the severity of the necessary remedy.

If reform is an ambiguous and many-headed thing, the leading reformers are as far as possible from being a body of men capable of mutual cooeperation.  They differ almost as widely among themselves as they do from the beneficiaries or supporters of the existing abuses.  William R. Hearst, William Travers Jerome, Seth Low, and George B. McClellan are all in their different ways reformers; but they would not constitute precisely a happy family.  Indeed, Mr. Hearst, who in his own opinion is the only immaculate reformer, is, in the eyes of his fellow-reformers, as dangerous a public enemy as the most corrupt politician or the most unscrupulous millionaire.  Any reformer who, like Mr. William Jennings Bryan, proclaims views which are in some respects more than usually radical, comes in for heartier denunciation from his brothers in reform than he does from the conservatives.  Each of our leading reformers is more or less a man on horseback, who is seeking to popularize a particular brand of