As to the medieval cities of Italy, the free cities of Germany and the cities of Great Britain, struggling all of them against some overlord, some king, noble or bishop, so at last there came to our cities a realization of the vassalage they were under. Their destinies were in the hands of the country politicians in the state legislature who had no sympathy with city problems, because they had no understanding of them. Oftenest indeed they had a contempt for them, they all held to the Puritan ideal. But a demand for freedom went up from Cleveland, from Cincinnati, from Columbus, from Toledo. The legislature began to make its reluctant concessions; it gave cities, for instance, the right to have street railway franchises referred to the people for approval or rejection. And at last in the great awakening, the state constitution was ultimately amended and cities were given home rule. It was the irony of life that Golden Rule Jones and Tom Johnson could not have lived to see that day! LXII A few weeks after my election to a fourth term I wrote out and gave to the reporters a statement in which I said that I would not be again a candidate for the office of mayor. I had been thinking of my old ambition in letters, and of those novels I had planned to write. Already I had been six years in office and I had not written a novel in all that time. And here I was, just entering upon another term. If ever I were to write those novels I would better be about it, before I grew too old and too tired. The politicians, regarding all such statements as but the professional insincerities of their trade, could not consider my decision seriously of course, or credit its intention. They were somewhat like my friends in the literary world, or like some of them at least, who were unable to understand why I should not continue indefinitely to run for mayor, though the politicians were not so innocent and credulous, since they did not believe that I could as inevitably continue to be elected. I suppose it was the life of action that appealed to my literary friends or to their literary imaginations; they had the human habit of disparaging their own calling, and, if they did not hold my performance in that field as lightly as the politicians held it, they wondered why I did not prefer politics. The politicians in their harangues spoke of my writings bitterly, as though they were a personal affront to their intelligences, and urged the electorate to rebuke me for spending my time upon such nonsense. If I had not known that they had never read my books, or any books, all this might have been chilling to the literary aspiration, but I knew them to their heart’s core, where there was nothing but contempt for books, and, as I sometimes thought, yielding too much to cynicism and despair, nothing but contempt for any sort of beauty or goodly impulse. Of course, they were not so bad as that; out of politics they were as good as anyone or