Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/236

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East Side is receiving its due consideration in comparison with the West Side; whether boys have the right to play ball in the streets, and lovers to spoon in parks, and whose conceptions of morals is to prevail—these, like the sins of the Psalmist, are ever before him.

And with it all there is a strange, inexplicable belief in the almost supernatural power of a mayor. I have been waited on by committees—of aged men—demanding that I stop at once those lovers who sought the public park on moonlit nights in June, I have been roused from bed at two o'clock in the morning, with a demand that a team of horses in a barn four miles on the other side of town be fed; innumerable ladies have appealed to me to compel their husbands to show them more affectionate attention, others have asked me to prohibit their neighbors from talking about them. One Jewish resident was so devout that he emigrated to Jerusalem, and his family insisted that I recall him; a Christian missionary asked me to detail policemen to assist him in converting the Jews to his creed; and pathetic mothers were ever imploring me to order the release of their sons and husbands from prisons and penitentiaries, over which I had no possible jurisdiction. I have recalled I know not how many times a remark Jones made one evening after one of those weary days I afterward came to know so well; "I could wash my hands every day in women's tears."

Of course, the main thing was not to wash one's hands of them or their difficulties. I remember one