No, neither for them, nor for us, had the dream come true. But it had come nearer. It had become possible. Many obstacles had been removed; many purifications had been wrought, many deliverances achieved. To Cleveland and to Toledo, those two cities by the lake, the years had brought their changes. Not objectively, perhaps; outwardly they were much the same--without form, inharmonious, ugly, with the awful antitheses of our economic system, and what is worse, the vast welter of mediocrity and banality between. But there had been ameliorations. In each of them there were plans traced for beautiful civic centers with groups of buildings and other public amenities, which, when realized, would render them comparable in that respect to those old cities of Europe where the benison of art has descended on the people from the hands of kings. And these things were coming up out of the people, despite provincialism and philistinism and politics; there was a new understanding of sovereignty, not as a menace descending from above, but as an aspiration coming up from below. And this new aspiration in the people, pressing with the irresistible urge of moral sentiment against old institutions will renovate the cities and recreate the lives in them. For after all the world grows better. Not as rapidly as we should like, but yet, in a way, better. The immense sophistication of the modern mood, to be sure, is apt to cast contemporary thought in the mould of multifold negation; and sensibilities, long distressed by the contemplation of life in aspects it would not wear were this more of a realm of reason, find their only solace in that pessimism which makes charming so much of modern poetry. Doubtless this is the mood most congenial to the agnosticism of the reflective, contemplative mind in the present phase of its philosophy. It has its undoubted fascinations, its uses, and, indeed, its truth, part reaction though it be from the excessive strain of contemporary life in cities, and the dull orthodoxies of the Victorian age. To one, indeed, who, in eight years’ participation in municipal politics might in that respect have been compared to that character in one of Anatole France’s novels who never opened a door without coming upon some hitherto unsuspected depth of infamy in mankind, it was difficult to avoid that strain. And yet, bad as municipal government has been in this land, it is everywhere better to-day. The level of moral sentiment, like the level of intelligence, mounts slowly, in wide spirals, but it mounts steadily all the time. In not every city has the advance been so marked, for not every city has had such personalities as Johnson and Jones, and without personalities, democracies seem unable to function. The old corruptions, once so flagrant, are growing less and less, and there is left only the residuum of meanness and pettiness and spite, the crimes that require no courage and entail no fear of the law, committed by beings who