She made another mock deferential courtesy. "Thank you, my lord and master; and lest you have not made it sufficiently clear that my superiority in this respect is due to your—your nagging, I mention again that you are chiefly responsible for it. It bores me, but I submit to it."
"Continue then your docility so far as to write the names which you have just recited on separate slips of paper and put them in a proper receptacle. Then I will draw one as a preliminary step in the political drama which I intend to present for the edification of our correspondent."
Josephine did as she was bid, and in the process, by way of showing that she was not such a martyr as she would have the world believe, remarked, "If you had really been elected, Fred, I think I might have made a valuable political ally. What I find tedious about politics is that they're not practical—that is for me. If you were in Congress now, I should make a point of having everything political at the tip of my tongue."
"Curiously enough, my dear, I am just going to give an object lesson in practical politics, and you as well as our young friend may be able to learn wisdom from it. Now for a blind choice!" I added, putting my hand into the work-bag which she held out.
"Aldermen!" I announced after scrutinizing the slip which I had drawn. Josephine's nose went up a trifle.
"A very fortunate and comprehensive selection," I asserted. "The Alderman and the influences which operate upon and around him lie at the root of American practical politics. And from a careful study of the root you will be able to decide how genuinely healthy and free from taint must be the tree—the tree which bears such ornamental flowers as Presidents and United States Senators, gorgeous blooms of apparent dignity and perfume.">[
This being a drama, my young patriot, I wish to introduce you to the stage and the principal characters. The stage is any city in the United States of three hundred thousand or more inhabitants. It would be invidious for me to mention names where any one would answer to the requirements. Some may be worse than others, but all are bad enough. A bold and pessimistic beginning, is it not, my optimistic friend?
And now for the company. This drama differs from most dramatic productions in that it makes demands upon a large number of actors. To produce it properly on the theatrical stage would bankrupt any manager unless he were subsidized heavily from the revenues of the twenty leading villains. The cast includes besides twenty leading villains, twelve low comedians, no hero, no heroine (except, incidentally, Josephine); eight newspaper editors; ten thousand easy-going second-class villains; ten thousand patriotic, conscientious, and enlightened citizens, including a sprinkling of ardent reformers; twenty-five thousand zealous, hide-bound partisans; fifty thousand respectable, well-intentioned, tolerably ignorant citizens who vote but are too busy with their own affairs to pay attention to politics, and as a consequence generally vote the party ticket, or vote to please a "friend"; ten thousand superior, self-centred souls who neglect to vote and despise politics anyway, among them poets, artists, scientists, some men of leisure, and travellers; ten thousand enemies of social order such as gamblers, thieves, keepers of dives, drunkards, and toughs; and your philosopher.
A very large stock company. I will leave the precise arithmetic to you. I wish merely to indicate the variegated composition of the average political constituency, and to let you perceive that the piece which is being performed is no parlor comedy. It is written in dead earnest, and it seems to me that the twenty leading villains, though smooth and in some instances aristocratic appearing individuals, are among the most dangerous characters in the history of this or any other stage. But before I refer to them more particularly I will make you acquainted with our twelve low comedians—the Board of Aldermen.
It is probably a surprise to you and to Josephine that the Aldermen are not the villains. Everything is comparative in this world, and, though I might have made them villains without injustice to such virtues as they possess, I should have been at a loss how to stigmatize the real promoters of the villainy. And after all there is an element of grotesque comedy about the character of Aldermen in a large American city. The indecency of the situation is so unblushing, and the public is so helpless, that the performers remind one in their good-natured antics of the thieves in Fra Diavolo; they get bolder and bolder and now barely take the trouble to wear the mask of respectability.