But it will not do; it will not suffice. This view of life is simple only because it is narrow and confined; in far perspectives there appear curious and perplexing contradictions. And even then, the most exhaustive analysis of life and of human society, however immense and comprehensive, however logical and inevitable its generalizations, must always fall short simply because no human mind and no assembly of human minds can ever wholly envisage the vast and bewildering complexity of human life. Each man views life from that angle where he happens to have been placed by forces he cannot comprehend. All of which no doubt is a mere repetition in feebler terms of what has heretofore been spoken of the inherent vice of the sectarian mind. There are no rigid distinctions of good and bad, of proletarians and capitalists, of privileged and proscribed; there are just people, just folks, as Jones said, with their human weaknesses, follies, and mistakes, their petty ambitions, their miserable jealousies and envies, their triumphs, and glories and boundless dreams, and all tending somewhither, they know not where nor how, and all pretty much alike. And government, be its form what it may, is but the reflection of all these qualities. The city, said Coriolanus, is the people, and as Jones used to say, with those strange embracing gestures, “I believe in _all_ the people.” XXXVIII However, all these confused elements make the task of a mayor exceedingly difficult, especially in America where there are, not so many kinds of people, but so many different standards and customs and habits. When one gets down into humanity, one beholds not two classes, separate and distinct as the sexes, but innumerable classes. In Toledo something more than twenty languages and dialects are spoken every day, and as the mayor is addressed the chorus becomes a very babel, a confusion of tongues, all counseling him to his duty. The result is apt to be perplexing at times. The rights of “business” in the streets and to the public property, the proper bounds within which strikers and strike breakers are to be confined, the limitations of the activities of pickets, the hours in which it is proper to drink beer, who in the community should gamble, whether Irishmen or Germans make the better policemen; the exact proportion of public jobs which Poles and Hungarians should hold; whether Socialists on their soap boxes are obstructing traffic or merely exercising the constitutional right of free speech, whether there are more Catholics than Protestants holding office; whether the East Side is receiving its due consideration in comparison with the West Side; whether boys have the right to play ball in the streets, and lovers to spoon in parks, and whose conceptions of morals is to prevail--these, like the sins of the Psalmist, are ever before him.