The attitude of the intelligent middle classes is more frankly hostile and aggressive than that of the wage earners; it does not, unfortunately, take the shape of a demand for a higher basis for suffrage, but of a persistent opposition to the characteristic operations of manhood suffrage government, such as appropriation of the spoils, and to its various political expedients to please the rabble or bamboozle the public. It is practically assumed by the middle class citizen, that officialdom is inimical to the public welfare; and, especially in the great cities, there is a steady and outspoken demand for a remedy for the present notorious misgovernment; that something be done to protect Society against its enemies, the politicians in and out of office. This feeling of American distrust of our own public servants is frequently apparent in legislation enacted as a result of agitation following one of the numerous revelations of official misconduct. Thus, in some cities the police power has been taken entirely out of the hands of the local authorities and lodged in the government of the state. One reform city charter of St. Louis provided that the mayor elected for four years could not remove any official till his own third year in office. These and many similar statutes are in effect formal assertions of the complete breakdown of manhood suffrage; that the elected municipal officials cannot be trusted either to police the city or to remove or appoint subordinate officers. The mayor under such a system has to manage the best he can with deputies over whom he has little or no control. It seems as if political imbecility could go no farther than to create a system under which the mayor of the city is certain to be untrustworthy and must therefore be deprived of power to control his subordinates. And yet no doubt these provisions were but the recognition of the desperate situation of a manhood suffrage municipality. In one of the instances just referred to the object of the city charter seems to have been to vary the misery; two years chaos and two years ring-rule, turnabout.