The practical question is: “Do you want good plumbing, or do you want the truth?” You cannot have both this year. If the association goes out and tells the public exactly what it knows, it will get itself laughed at, insult the candidate, and elect his opponent. If it tells the truth, it might as well run a candidate of its own as a protest and an advertisement of that truth. It can buy good plumbing with a lie, and the old gentleman thinks it ought to do so. The reformers are going to endorse the candidate, and upon their heads will be visited his theft of the books. They have sold out the little public confidence they held. Had they stood out for another year, under the practical régime which they had already endured for twenty, and had they devoted themselves to augmenting the public interest in the school question, both parties would have offered them plumbing and books to allay the excitement. The parties might, perhaps, have relaxed their grip on the whole school system rather than meet the issue. But the Association does not understand this. It does not, as yet, clearly know its own mind. All this procedure, this going forward and back, is necessary. The community must pass through these experiences before it discovers that the shortest road to good schools is truth. A few men learn by each turn of the wheel, and these men tend to consolidate. They become a sort of school of political thought. They see that they do not care a whit more about the schools than they do about the parks; that the school agitation is a handy way to make the citizens take notice of maladministration in all departments; that the parties may be left to reform themselves, and to choose the most telling bid for popular favor; that the parties must do this and will do this, in so far as the public demands it, and will not do it under any other circumstances. It is the very greatest folly in the world for an agitator to be content with a partial success. It destroys his cause. He fades instantly. You cannot see him. He is become part of the corrupt and contented public. His business is to make others demand good administration. He must never reap, but always sow. Let him leave the reaping to others. There will be many of them, and their material accomplishments will be the same whether he endorses them or not. If by chance some party, some administration gives him one hundred per cent of what he demands, let him acknowledge it handsomely; but he need not thank them. They did it because they had to, or because their conscience compelled them. In neither case was it done for him.