In relating this veracious little tale of the lid of Loami, perhaps I have not sufficiently revealed that attitude of moral sympathy toward the good characters in the story which Tolstoy insists a writer should always assume and maintain. But this has not been due to any want of that sympathy. In the shadows of the scene the figure of the mayor, for instance, has ever been present--the keenest sufferer, the most unhappy man of them all. He was the one of all of them who was burdened with official responsibility; the marble-playing faction was happy in that it had no responsibility save of that light, artificial sort imposed by the rules of its game; its conscience, indeed, was untroubled. The other faction--the goo-goos, or whatever they were called in Loami--felt responsible primarily for the short-comings of others; their consciences were troubled only by the sins of other people, the easiest and most comfortable, because it is the most normal, position that the human conscience can assume. But the mayor was held responsible for everything and everybody, and in seeking to do his duty he found that difficulty which must everywhere increase in a society and a civilization which, in casting off some of its old moorings, recognizes less the responsibility of parent and teacher, not to mention personal responsibility, and is more and more disposed to look to the law and its administrators as the regulators and mentors of conduct. XLIV It is an axiom of municipal politics that a reform administration, or an administration elected as a protest against the evils of machine government, boss rule, and the domination of public service corporations, is immediately confronted by the demand of those who call themselves the good people to enforce all the sumptuary laws and to exterminate vice. That is, the privileged interests and their allies and representatives seek to divert the attention of the administration from themselves and their larger and more complex immoralities to the small and uninfluential offenders, an old device, always, in the hope of escape, inspired by privilege when pursued, just as friends of the fox might turn aside the hounds by drawing the aniseed bag across the trail. Many a progressive administration in this land has been led into that _cul de sac_, and as Mr. Carl Hovey observed recently of the neat saying to the effect that the way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it, the process usually proves to be merely the way to get rid of a good administration. The effort had been made by the opponents of Golden Rule Jones and it had failed. It had been attempted in the case of Tom Johnson and it had failed, though curiously enough the effort was never made in Toledo or in Cleveland or in Cincinnati, or elsewhere for that matter, in the days of machine domination. The Puritan never lets his religion interfere with business.