Ethics as well as political opinions may be discussed and disseminated among the sophisticated by lectures and printed pages, but to the common people they can only come through example—­through a personality which seizes the popular imagination.  The advantage of an unsophisticated neighborhood is, that the inhabitants do not keep their ideas as treasures—­they are untouched by the notion of accumulating them, as they might knowledge or money, and they frankly act upon those they have.  The personal example promptly rouses to emulation.  In a neighborhood where political standards are plastic and undeveloped, and where there has been little previous experience in self-government, the office-holder himself sets the standard, and the ideas that cluster around him exercise a specific and permanent influence upon the political morality of his constituents.

Nothing is more certain than that the quality which a heterogeneous population, living in one of the less sophisticated wards, most admires is the quality of simple goodness; that the man who attracts them is the one whom they believe to be a good man.  We all know that children long “to be good” with an intensity which they give to no other ambition.  We can all remember that the earliest strivings of our childhood were in this direction, and that we venerated grown people because they had attained perfection.

Primitive people, such as the South Italian peasants, are still in this stage.  They want to be good, and deep down in their hearts they admire nothing so much as the good man.  Abstract virtues are too difficult for their untrained minds to apprehend, and many of them are still simple enough to believe that power and wealth come only to good people.

The successful candidate, then, must be a good man according to the morality of his constituents.  He must not attempt to hold up too high a standard, nor must he attempt to reform or change their standards.  His safety lies in doing on a large scale the good deeds which his constituents are able to do only on a small scale.  If he believes what they believe and does what they are all cherishing a secret ambition to do, he will dazzle them by his success and win their confidence.  There is a certain wisdom in this course.  There is a common sense in the mass of men which cannot be neglected with impunity, just as there is sure to be an eccentricity in the differing and reforming individual which it is perhaps well to challenge.

The constant kindness of the poor to each other was pointed out in a previous chapter, and that they unfailingly respond to the need and distresses of their poorer neighbors even when in danger of bankruptcy themselves.  The kindness which a poor man shows his distressed neighbor is doubtless heightened by the consciousness that he himself may be in distress next week; he therefore stands by his friend when he gets too drunk to take care of himself, when he loses his wife or child, when he is evicted for non-payment of rent, when he is arrested for a petty crime.  It seems to such a man entirely fitting that his alderman should do the same thing on a larger scale—­that he should help a constituent out of trouble, merely because he is in trouble, irrespective of the justice involved.