It was Joseph Conrad, of course, of whom we were talking, the great Pole who even then had come to a mastery of our language that might shame most of his contemporary writers in it. I would not give “Lord Jim” for all the other sea stories that were ever written, not even if all the novels of Cooper and Scott and Stevenson and Dickens were thrown in. For Joseph Conrad can see all that the old sailor Steffens was imagining that day could see, and far more besides; he can see into the human soul. He had not written “Lord Jim” at that time, or if he had, I had not read it, nor had Steffens written his books about municipal government, to get back to the subject; too often, I fear, have I been thinking about some book of Joseph Conrad when I should have been thinking of municipal government. I did not know much about municipal government in those days, except what I had learned in Jones’s campaigns and that theoretical knowledge I had obtained in the courts as his attorney, and I had, I fear, the same indifference to the subject most of our citizens have. I should have preferred any time to talk about literature and I should prefer to do so now, since that is really so much more interesting and important. But the fact that we knew nothing about it in those days was not unusual; nobody knew much about it except that Mr. James Bryce had said that it was the most conspicuous failure of the American Commonwealth, and we quoted this observation so often that one might have supposed we were proud of the distinction. Certainly few in America in those days understood the subject in the sense in which it is understood in some of the British cities, like Glasgow, for instance, whose municipal democracy is so far ahead of ours, or in the German cities where municipal administration is veritably a science. But in Steffens’s case a lack of knowledge was in itself a qualification, since he had eyes, like the old sailor, and, like Joseph Conrad, the power to tell what he saw. That is, Steffens had vision, imagination, and if the history of the city in America is ever written he will fill a large place on its page.