The legislature, which is always interfering as much as possible with the cities, had changed the time of holding the municipal elections from the spring to the autumn, one change wrought by a legislature in cities that the people approved, since instead of those raw spring winds we now have the glorious weather the autumn usually brings us in the lake regions, with a sparkling air and a warm sun, and a long procession of golden days, on which one really should be playing golf, if one could play golf in the midst of a political campaign, which one could not, since art and politics, or at least the practice of them, are wholly incompatible. There was no old gray Molly to jog about from one meeting to another, and if there had been, she could not have jogged fast enough for the necessities of that hour; and we established new precedents when Percy Jones, the son of the Golden Rule Mayor, drove me about at furious speed in his big touring car, the “Grey Ghost” the reporters called it, and it streaked through the night, with its siren singing, from place to place until I had spoken at half a dozen meetings. Every day at noon it wheeled up to the entrance of the factories and shops as the men were coming out for their noon hour. And such meetings I believe were never held anywhere; there was an inspiration as the men crowded about the car to hear the speeches; they were not politicians, they were seeking nothing, they were interested in their city; and in their faces, what is far above any of these considerations, there was an eager interest in life, perhaps a certain hunger of life which in so many of them, such were the conditions of their toil, was not satisfied. XXXIV As I sat and looked out over the crowds that poured from the shops and stood, sometimes for the whole of the noon hour, in discomfort perhaps if the wind was off the lake, and saw the veritable hunger for life that was in their faces, a hunger surely which no political or economic system, however wise and perfect, could satisfy, I could not help thinking that it was a pity the clergy did not understand these people better, for, after all, the message of the Carpenter who came out of Nazareth was for the workers and the poor, and He had passionately thrown Himself on their side. It might have been suggested to that pastor who complained bitterly that his own pews were empty on Sunday evenings while the streets outside his church were crowded with people who for one evening at least were joyous and free from care, that the Master whom he served would have asked no better congregation than they and no better auditorium than the street.