It takes brains, moral standards, a knowledge of life and experience to put the district leaders and their cohorts in the place they belong. Talking against them accomplishes nothing while the majority he represents keeps him in power, yes, makes him possible. He makes morality an evil, dishonesty justice to the people who know him as the representative of republican principles. They are the people. They have left one land because it deprived them of rights. Rights as they know them are personal, and the district leader secures them. [Illustration: MEETING THE NEEDS OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD.] The opposition to the reform movement by the people governed by the district leader comes from the conviction, dimly conceived or implanted, that the election of the men who represent it would mean that everywhere merit and not "pull" would keep the voter at work; that business would have to be conducted according to law; that crime would be punished; that no man would hold the keys of the prison for their benefit, but for the protection of the community. One of the greatest moral lessons administered to the people of New York in a language that all understood, and one which all classes in the community needed, was given by the late Colonel George E. Waring. When he organized the Department of Street Cleaning on the merit system; when he proved to every man in the department that if he did his work no man could displace him; that he could defend himself, a man before men, if charges were brought against him, Colonel Waring changed the moral character of New York. Every man in that department had his friends to whom he carried the message; stood a free man employed by the city; a man who dared to vote as he would though in public service; would not be deprived of the right to earn his daily bread because of the use he made of his rights as an American citizen. This moral lesson went into every home. The woman whose husband handled a broom, drove a cart, held her head up, for the magic D. S. C. had changed a "job" that enslaved her husband to an employment that honored him. The enforcement of the law in the gathering of the garbage; the cleanliness of the streets in the tenement-house districts equal to those of the avenues, for the first time in generations brought the great truth to the consciousness of the people in the tenement-house regions that all men were equal. That the clean streets led to clean halls and cleaner homes was natural; and the further evolution meant clean characters, because of moral freedom to express opinion in a ballot cast at no man's command.