Puritanism that has made the cities of America so ugly, or permitted them to be ugly; such conceptions as beauty and ugliness are perhaps impossible to minds that know no distinction but good and bad, and for this reason it has been difficult to make an æsthetic appeal with any effectiveness. During three of my four terms in that office the nasty quarrel about morals raged. As I look back and think now with what virulence it did rage, it appeals to me as a remarkable psychological phenomenon. Of course it was bad for those who engaged in it, and bad for the town as well, for such an exaggerated idea of conditions was given that the police in neighboring cities, clever rogues that they were, could always excuse and exculpate themselves for any of their delinquencies by saying that the thieves that had come to town hailed from Toledo, or that those they could not catch had gone and taken refuge there. But I did not engage in the discussion nor permit the police officials to do so. There was no time, since there was so much other work to do, and we went on as well as we could with what Tom Johnson used to call the policy of administrative repression, improving moral conditions with such means as we had. We did succeed in eliminating the wine rooms, in closing the saloons at midnight, and finally, after a tremendous effort, in extirpating professional gambling. It was of no consequence that it did not have any effect upon criticism, for we did not do it to stop criticism, and the discussion went on until I had been elected for the third time, and immediately after that election when a large majority of the people had again spoken their minds on the subject, it was considered the proper time to reopen the discussion and to hold a so-called civic revival. The young, uncultured man they brought to town to conduct that revival, could have known nothing whatever of life, and was wholly unconscious of the great economic forces which, with so much complexity and friction, were building the modern city. He came to call on me before he opened his revival that he might have, as he said, a personal, private and confidential talk. When I asked him how the city could be regenerated, he said he did not know, but this fact did not prevent him from telling the audiences he addressed that week just what should be done, and that he, for instance, could nobly do it, and in the end they sent a committee to me to tell me what to do, if not how to do it. I asked the committee to reduce their complaints to writing, to point out those evils which they considered most objectionable, and to propose means of combating them. The committee went away and I confess I did not expect to see them again because I had no notion that they could ever agree as to the particular evils, but after some weeks they had come to terms on a few heads, and filed their complaint pointing out several specific vices in town, and as a remedy proposed