street railways now in a corner. The negotiations are on, and they could squeeze them with a vengeance. What is the spirit of those aldermen? “Well,” said one to me, “I’ll tell you how we feel. We’ve got to get the city’s interests well protected. That’s first. But we’ve got more to do than that. They’re shy of us; these capitalists don’t know how to handle us. They are not up to the new, reform, on-the-level way of doing business. We’ve got to show capital that we will give them all that is coming to them, and just a little more—a little more, just to get them used to being honest.” This was said without a bit of humor, with some anxiety but no bitterness, and not a word about socialism or “confiscating municipal ownership”; that’s a “capitalistic” bugaboo. Again, one Saturday night a personal friend of mine who had lost a half-holiday at a conference with some of the leading aldermen, complained of their “preciseness.” “First,” he said, “they had to have every trivial interest of the city protected, then, when we seemed to be done, they turned around and argued like corporation lawyers for the protection of the corporation.”
Those Chicago aldermen are an honor to the country! Men like Jackson and Mavor, Herrmann and Werno, would be a credit to any legislative body in the land, but there is no such body in the 272land
