to be designated by three citizens to be named by the bankers. Barton had carefully formulated the whole matter, and he presented it with his usual clarity and effectiveness; but rivalry between the banks for the city’s business, and fear of incurring the displeasure of some of their individual depositors who were closely allied with the bosses of the bipartisan machine, caused the scheme to be rejected. Our lunch-table strategy board was highly amused by Barton’s failure, which was just what we had predicted. Barton accepted his defeat with equanimity and spoke kindly of the bankers as good men but deficient in courage. But in the primaries the following spring he got himself nominated for city councilman. No one knew just how he had accomplished this. Of course, as things go in our American cities, no one qualified for membership in a university club is eligible for any municipal office, and no man of our acquaintance had ever before offered himself for a position so utterly without honor or dignity. Even more amazing than Barton’s nomination was Barton’s election. Our councilmen are elected at large, and we had assumed that any strength he might develop in the more prosperous residential districts would be overbalanced by losses in industrial neighborhoods. The results proved to be quite otherwise. Barton ran his own campaign. He made no speeches, but spent the better part of two months personally appealing to mechanics and laborers, usually in their homes or on their door-steps. He was at pains to keep out of the newspapers, and his own party organization (he is a Republican) gave him only the most grudging support. We joked him a good deal about his election to an office that promised nothing to a man of his type but annoyance and humiliation. His associates in the council were machine men, who had no knowledge whatever of enlightened methods of conducting cities. The very terminology in which municipal government is discussed by the informed was as strange to them as Sanskrit. His Republican colleagues cheerfully ignored him, and shut him out of their caucuses; the Democrats resented his appearance in the council chamber as an unwarranted intrusion--“almost an indelicacy,” to use Barton’s own phrase. The biggest joke of all was Barton’s appointment to the chairmanship of the Committee on Municipal Art. That this was the only recognition his associates accorded to the keenest lawyer in the State--a man possessing a broad knowledge of municipal methods, gathered in every part of the world--was ludicrous, it must be confessed; but Barton was not in the least disturbed, and continued to suffer our chaff with his usual good humor. Barton is a secretive person, but we learned later that he had meekly asked the president of the council to give him this appointment. And it was conferred upon him chiefly because no one else wanted it, there being, obviously, “nothing in” municipal art discernible to the bleared eye of the average councilman.