he wrote that excellent novel, “The Main Chance,” and in that country place with him and other charming friends near by I spent the summer. But when I came home in the autumn the campaign was already on, and the Independents had all but nominated me as their candidate for mayor. They were forced to make their nominations by petition, and on the petitions proposing me for the office there were many thousands of names, pages that were stained with the grime and dust and grease of factories and shops--a diploma in its way, which might have made one proud, had not the prospect been one to make one so very unhappy. For I knew what the mayoralty had done to Jones. I had come to realize in my association with him that there is no position more difficult than that of the mayor of a large city in the America of our times, for the city is a kind of microcosm where are posited in miniature all the problems of a democracy, and the fact that they are in miniature only increases the difficulty. My ambitions lay in another field, and besides I had a feeling against it, dim and vague, though since adequately expressed in one of those fine generalizations which Señor Guglielmo Ferrero makes on his brilliant page; “there is no sphere of activity,” he says, writing of the perils of political life, “which is so much at the mercy of unforeseen accidents or where the effort put out is so incommensurable with the result obtained.” It is, of course, one of the privileges of the citizen in a democracy to be “mentioned” for public office; if no one else mentions him he can mention himself, and whenever someone else does mention him there are many who ascribe to his originality the credit for the suggestion. It seems difficult for our people to understand any man who really does not desire public office in a land where it has so long been regarded purely as a privilege to be bestowed or a prize to be contested. I suppose that even the blunt and grim old warrior Sherman caused the people to smile when he said that if nominated for the presidency he would not accept and if elected he would not serve. They wondered what he meant, and for a time it never occurred to them that he meant just what he said.