would follow. It is an old mental attitude in this world, well treated of in books, and understood and recognized by everyone except those who adopt it, and in its spirit every new reform is promulgated by its avatar. But the reformer never thinks of himself in any such light, of course, he does not understand it any more than he understands mankind's distrust of him. It is the instinctive fear of the theorist that has been felt for every one of them from Robespierre, the archtype, and impossibilist par excellence, down to the latest man haranguing his little idle crowd on the street corner.
XL
These observations come with the recollection of
those days of my first term in the mayor's office
when I had so much to do with reformers that I
earnestly desired that no one would ever include me
in their category. They came to see me so often
and in such numbers that my whole view of life was
quite in danger of distortion. It seemed that half
the populace had set forth in a rage to reform mankind,
and their first need was to get the mayor to use
the police force to help them. When they did not
call at the office, they were writing letters. The
favorite day for these expressions of the reforming
spirit was Monday. I had been many months in the
office however, before I was able to make this generalization,
though from the first I could observe
that Monday took on something of that dismal and
