But the day came at last when I must decide, and to a committee of the Independents I said that I should give them an answer in the morning. I thought it all over again in the watches of the night,--and the unfinished manuscript on my library table--and at last, since somebody had to do it, since somebody had to point out at least the danger of risking the community rights in the hands of a political machine, I said I would accept. I suppose that it is but an expression of that ironic mood in which the Fates delight to deal with mortals that it should be so easy to get that which one does not want; the Independents insisted on my standing for the office, but the only humor in that fact was just then too grim for pleasure, though there is always a compensation somewhere after all, and gloomy as I was that morning at the prospect of the bitter campaign and the difficulties that would follow if I were elected, I could laugh when “Dad” McCullough, the old Scotsman whom we all loved for himself and for his devotion to our movement, leaned forward in his chair, stroked his whiskers in a mollifying way and, as though he preferred even the other members of his committee not to hear him, said: “Would it be out of place if I suggested that in the campaign you bear down as lightly as possible on the infirmities of the law?” His shrewd sense even then warned him of the herring that would be drawn across the trail of privilege as soon as we struck it! And he was right. We had not opened our campaign at Golden Rule Hall, before privilege did what it always does when it is pursued, it tried to divert attention from itself by pointing out a smaller evil. All the old and conventional complaints about the morals of the city to which we had been used in Jones’s campaigns were revived and repeated with embellishments and improvements; no city was ever reviled as was ours by those who had failed in their efforts to control it and absorb the product of its communal toil. My attitude, conceived by “Dad” McCullough as “bearing down on the infirmities of the law,” was now represented as evidence of an intention to ignore the law, to enforce none of the statutes, and it was predicted that the election of the Independent ticket meant nothing but anarchy and chaos. To this “moral” issue that had served for so many years, the “good” people responded immediately, as they always do, and with certain of the clergy to lead them rallied instantly about the machine, and for six weeks reveled in an inspection of all the city’s vices, and mouseled in the slums and stews of the tenderloin for examples of the depravity which they declared it was the purpose and design of the Independents to intensify and perpetuate. Their own candidate had been in power for a year and a half and these conditions had existed unmolested, but when some of our speakers indicated this inconsistency in their attitude they only raged the more.