And with it all there is a strange, inexplicable belief in the almost supernatural power of a mayor. I have been waited on by committees--of aged men--demanding that I stop at once those lovers who sought the public park on moonlit nights in June, I have been roused from bed at two o’clock in the morning, with a demand that a team of horses in a barn four miles on the other side of town be fed; innumerable ladies have appealed to me to compel their husbands to show them more affectionate attention, others have asked me to prohibit their neighbors from talking about them. One Jewish resident was so devout that he emigrated to Jerusalem, and his family insisted that I recall him; a Christian missionary asked me to detail policemen to assist him in converting the Jews to his creed; and pathetic mothers were ever imploring me to order the release of their sons and husbands from prisons and penitentiaries, over which I had no possible jurisdiction. I have recalled I know not how many times a remark Jones made one evening after one of those weary days I afterward came to know so well; “I could wash my hands every day in women’s tears.” Of course, the main thing was not to wash one’s hands of them or their difficulties. I remember one poor soul whose husband was in the penitentiary. She came to me in a despair that was almost frantic, and showed me a letter she had received from her husband. A new governor had been elected in that state wherein he was imprisoned, and he urged his wife, in the letter she gave me to read, to secure a pardon for him before the new governor was inaugurated. “They say,” he wrote, “that the new governor is a good church member, which is a bad sign for being good to prisoners.” Poor soul! It was impossible to explain to her that I was wholly powerless. She stood and humbly shook her sorrowful head, and to each new attempt at explanation she said: “You are the father of all.” It was a phrase which most of the women of the foreign born population employed; they repeated it as though it were some charmed formula. This exaggerated notion of the mayoral power was not confined to those citizens of the foreign quarters; it was shared by many of the native Americans, who held the mayor responsible for all the vices of the community, and I was never more sharply criticized than when, in refusing to sanction the enactment of a curfew ordinance, I tentatively advanced the suggestion that, if it did not seem too outrageously radical, the rearing and training of children was the duty, not so much of the police as of parents, pastors and teachers.