The political conditions of the city several years ago gave birth to one of the periodic moral upheavals that resulted in the election of a strong, earnest, loyal, church-supporting citizen as Mayor. This Mayor was anxious to raise the character of the city government. He determined to accomplish this by the character of his appointments. He had more than a superficial knowledge of the public schools, which at that time were the theater for the exercise of political "pulls." It was known for years that the Board of Education had been used to a greater or less extent to pay political debts, to create political capital for future use by some of its most active members. The new Mayor had it in his power to change the character of the Board, and he carefully considered his appointments. In one of the sections of the city where, numerically as to families, wealth and poverty were fairly balanced, a section having in it churches of every denomination, many of them maintaining missions in the same political unit--there was at least this expression of neighborly interest--the schools were among the first built in the city. The last school building erected at the time of this Mayor's election had been built twenty years before; one had been built when the foundation for the pillars of the elevated road had been set in front of the site before it was purchased by the Board of Education, and was now in the heart of a crowded foreign settlement, had no out-door playground; the third building in the school district was so old, so badly planned, that for years effort had been made to secure a new building, but were defeated by the indifference, and at times the opposition, of the best citizens of the district, according to their own estimate. The new Mayor determined to put the best men in the district on the Board. Twenty-eight men in that district, men of power, men of standards, some of them philanthropists actively interested in work for the poor, declined. The men appointed, the best he could get to serve, were unfit for the position--mentally unfit, for they were uneducated; or morally unfit, because any position paid or unpaid under the city government was conceived by them as just so great an opportunity to create political capital or realize perquisites put within their control by their appointments. The Mayor had begun at the top to make his appointments. The declinations of the honor were because of lack of time, a lack of knowledge. When the appointments were announced, there was a storm of criticism, and none more violent than the majority of the men who declined to serve on the Board.