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 naive 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