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 him.  The Italian himself is at last waking up to this fact.  In a political speech recently made by an Italian padrone, he bitterly reproached the alderman for giving the-four-dollars-a-day “jobs” of sitting in an office to Irishmen and the-dollar-and-a-half-a-day “jobs” of sweeping the streets to the Italians.  This general struggle to rise in life, to be at least politically represented by one of the best, as to occupation and social status, has also its negative side.  We must remember that the imitative impulse plays an important part in life, and that the loss of social estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhaps most dreaded by the humblest, among whom freedom of individual conduct, the power to give only just weight to the opinion of neighbors, is but feebly developed.  A form of constraint, gentle, but powerful, is afforded by the simple desire to do what others do, in order to share with them the approval of the community.  Of course, the larger the number of people among whom an habitual mode of conduct obtains, the greater the constraint it puts upon the individual will.  Thus it is that the political corruption of the city presses most heavily where it can be least resisted, and is most likely to be imitated.

According to the same law, the positive evils of corrupt government are bound to fall heaviest upon the poorest and least capable.  When the water of Chicago is foul, the prosperous buy water bottled at distant springs; the poor have no alternative but the typhoid fever which comes from using the city’s supply.  When the garbage contracts are not enforced, the well-to-do pay for private service; the poor suffer the discomfort and illness which are inevitable from a foul atmosphere.  The prosperous business man has a certain choice as to whether he will treat with the “boss” politician or preserve his independence on a smaller income; but to an Italian day laborer it is a choice between obeying the commands of a political “boss” or practical starvation.  Again, a more intelligent man may philosophize a little upon the present state of corruption, and reflect that it is but a phase of our commercialism, from which we are bound to emerge; at any rate, he may give himself the solace of literature and ideals in other directions, but the more ignorant man who lives only in the narrow present has no such resource; slowly the conviction enters his mind that politics is a matter of favors and positions, that self-government means pleasing the “boss” and standing in with the “gang.”  This slowly acquired knowledge he hands on to his family.  During the month of February his boy may come home from school with rather incoherent tales about Washington and Lincoln, and the father may for the moment be fired to tell of Garibaldi, but such talk is only periodic, and the long year round the fortunes of the entire family, down to the opportunity to earn food and shelter, depend upon the “boss.”