Reflect, for a moment, upon the present colossal issues of municipal government. A hundred thousand, a million, or five millions of persons are forced, for better or for worse, for good or for evil, to live together. In the recent municipal elections, the great city of New York continued the domination of Tammany Hall, by a vote of more than two to one. The people of Buffalo elected a mayor who received a majority of votes because he promised upon election to throw the Eighteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution into the waste basket. Youngstown, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana, elected "freak" mayors, ignorant and inexperienced, whose campaigns for office both they and those who heard them treated as huge practical jokes. The great city of Cleveland, Ohio, containing nearly a million inhabitants, elected as mayor a man who was expelled from the position of Chief of Police because of proved irregularities and unfitness to hold office. In the midst of our war with Germany, Chicago re-elected as mayor a man who, throughout the war, was an outspoken enemy of his country. In the outright venality of every sort, the government of the city of Chicago, I am informed, exceeds any in the country, even New York. Through the South we have not been able to secure since the War Between the States, as a general thing, that fine type of political leader who did such honor to our section in the earlier period. Our country is not receiving from the South that contribution of leadership which history might lead us to expect. The industrial North and East should naturally lead the nation in the solution of the peculiar problems of industrialism. Its remnant of American population readily admit their utter failure. We of the South can offer no help. A full generation of so-called reforms have ended largely in failure. Even seats in the United States Senate now go to the highest bidder like old furniture at an auction sale. The minority which is decent, honest, and informed, is giving up the fight. The ballot in the hands of ignorant and untrained immigrants, of Negroes, and of illiterate native whites, has proven to be a terrible flare-back, burning our hope of progress to ashes. Again force the ballot upon the southern Negro and we of the South will outdo the North in political failure and decay.