The city was beginning to feel the edge of Barton’s little ironies. At the club we all realized that he was animated by a definite and high purpose in thus flaunting in enduring bronze the shame of the city. “It is to such men as these,” said Barton, referring to the gentlemen he had favored with his statue and tablets, “that we confide all our affairs. For years we have stupidly allowed a band of outlaws to run our town. They spend our money; they manage in their own way large affairs that concern all of us; they sneer at all the forces of decency; they have made serfs of us. These scoundrels are our creatures, and we encourage and foster them; they represent us and our ideals, and it’s only fitting that we should publish their merits to the world.” While Barton was fighting half a dozen injunction suits brought to thwart the further expenditure of Follonsby’s money for memorials of men of notorious misfeasance or malfeasance, another city election rolled round. By this time there had been a revulsion of feeling. The people began to see that after all there might be a way of escape. Even the newspapers that had most bitterly assailed Barton declared that he was just the man for the mayoralty, and he was fairly driven into office at the head of a non-partisan municipal ticket. The Boulevard of Rogues we called it for a time. But after Barton had been in the mayor’s office a year he dumped the O’Grady statue into the river, destroyed the tablets, and returned to the Follonsby Fund out of his own pocket the money he had paid for them. Three noble statues of honest patriots now adorn the boulevard, and half a dozen beautiful fountains have been distributed among the parks. The Barton plan is, I submit, worthy of all emulation. If every boss-ridden, machine-managed American city could once visualize its shame and folly as Barton compelled us to do, there would be less complaint about the general failure of local government. There is, when you come to think of it, nothing so preposterous in the idea of perpetuating in outward and visible forms the public servants we humbly permit to misgovern us. Nothing could be better calculated to quicken the civic impulse in the lethargic citizen than the enforced contemplation of a line of statues erected to rascals who have prospered at the expense of the community. I’m a little sorry, though, that Barton never carried out one of his plans, which looked to the planting in the centre of a down-town park of a symbolic figure of the city, felicitously expressed by a barroom loafer dozing on a whiskey barrel. I should have liked it, and Barton confessed to me the other day that he was a good deal grieved himself that he had not pulled it off! THE OPEN SEASON FOR AMERICAN NOVELISTS [1915] I