and respectable, who doubted my ability, there was none whose distrust could exceed my own. I knew one thing, at any rate, and that was, that I did not know.
Aside from my political principles, which I presume may as well be called liberal, and certain theories which were called radical, though even then I knew enough of human nature to know that they could not be realized, especially in one small city in the American Middle West, I had been able to make, or at least to recognize when others made them, as Mr. Bryce and most of the students of municipal government in America had done, two or three generalizations which, upon the whole, after four terms in a mayor's office testing them, I still believe to be sound. The first was that, whatever the mere form of local government, our cities were directly ruled by those small coteries we had come to call political machines; the second, that these machines ruled the cities for the benefit of public utility corporations; and the third, that the legal power through which this was accomplished was derived from legislatures controlled by the same persons in the same interest. That is, the people had no voice in their own affairs; representative government itself had disappeared. Therefore these remedies seemed to be indicated, as the doctors say—non-*partizan city elections, municipal ownership, and home rule for cities. This was the task, this was the program.
We had already defeated the machines; Jones had made that victory possible by his great pioneer work
