We submitted it to Henry Frisch, the police sergeant who had been
detailed for duty in the mayor’s office for many years, a dear and
comfortable soul, who had served under several mayors, and had
developed a philosophy of life that was a very Nirvana of comfort
and repose. Long ago, so it seemed when he smiled indulgently on the
discomfiture of blue Monday, he had given up humanity as a bad job; to
him the race was utterly and irredeemably hopeless, and without the
need of saying a word he could shake his honest head at the suggestion
of a new reform with a motion that was eloquent of all negation. He was
very tolerant, however, and made no argument in rebuttal, he simply
refused to accept humanity on any general plane; regarding the race as
a biological species merely, he would confide to you that his years of
experience at that post and as a policeman who had paced his beat and
afterward commanded a sergeant’s squad, had convinced him that it was
altogether depraved, dishonest and disgusting, but with any individual
specimen of the species he was not that way at all. He was really
kindness itself. The next minute, with tears in his eyes, he would go
to any extremes to help some poor devil out of trouble. Unless it were
reformers; for these he had no use, he said, and if his advice had been
accepted he would have been permitted to expel them from the City Hall
by their own beloved weapons of violence and force of arms. On Sundays
he went fishing.
Perhaps at the time of which I am thinking, if not very specifically
writing, there was more of this Monday spirit of reform than is
usual. In the first place, much is expected of a new official and
because he does not promptly work those miracles which are confidently
expected whether he was foolish enough to promise them or not, he is
so generally complained of that it may be set down as an axiom of
practical politics that any elected official, in the executive branch
of the government, could be recalled at any time during the first year
of his incumbency of his office. Just then, too, there had been elected
to the governorship a gentleman who had been very deeply devoted to
the interests of the Methodist Church, the strongest denomination
numerically in Ohio--the first governor of Ohio, indeed, was a
Methodist preacher--and because of that fact and because of the use in
his inaugural message of the magic phrase “law and order,” it was at
once announced in the most sensational manner of the sensational press
that, unless all the sumptuary laws in Ohio were drastically enforced,
all the mayors of the cities would be removed. Governor Pattison had
been elected as a Democrat, and during his campaign Tom Johnson and
I had supported him, and it was while we were in Columbus at his
inauguration that this sensation was exploited in the newspapers. I
remember how Tom Johnson received it when one of his coterie brought
the extra editions into the hotel and pointed out to him the dreadful
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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