You go to the city hall in St. Louis, the old one, which looks like a rickety tobacco warehouse, or the new one, which is a realization in material of a bad dream consequent upon too much rarebit, and you might as well be in Berlin. You are lost without an interpreter. You must talk German or a Joe Emmet dialect, to make yourself understood. Money only doesn't have to talk German at the city hall. That is transferred without being translated. The mayor of the town talks, in his public addresses, a lingo that would make the fortune of a vaudeville comedian of the Dutch Daly stripe; and his son, who is his secretary, has the physiognomical symptoms of intellectuality that you might expect in a dude who eats with his knife, or any Brummel of "the bad lands." The lower branch of the municipal legislature is a bedlam. Its sessions are eruptions of obscenity. Talk is indulged in that would cause the ejectment of the talker from a bawdy- house parlor. The august body never rouses into activity save over some measure with "stuff" in it. The combine will take as low as twenty-five dollars to beat or pass a bill. They introduce bills to induce the franchise holding syndicates to put up money to kill them, and business is at its best when two or three street railroad bosses can be led into bidding against each other for the passage or defeat of some measure. The St. Louis house of delegates is as fine a gang of rapacious ruffians as ever invited mob law in an American city. Politics in St. Louis is practiced by the pimps and pothouse habitues, just as in other cities. Two of the best known office holders in the city have been accused publicly of stealing $1,200 that was given them to support a measure for capitol removal at the last general election. They got the money to divide among the members of the city committee, and no member of that body ever saw a copper of it. The check was cashed, however. The governor appointed to their present offices the men who got the money.