We cross the square and enter the Town Hall with its shady arcades and its painted and gilded statues like those on the Hôtel de Ville of Bourges. We go up a broad stone stairway and enter the anteroom of the Provost, who is the head of the government. The room has fine tapestries on the walls, with much well-carved furniture, and the guards and ushers suggest neither by their costumes nor their manners the familiar police officers on duty in the ordinary city hall. The building and the officials and the grave and rather stately ceremonial all convey the impression that a Walled Town is both a City State and a Free State, and that its formal and personal expression is a matter of dignity, reverence and self-respect. Once, not long ago, being in a large city of the North-West, I was invited to address the Mayor and Aldermen on certain matters pertaining to that department of my own city government of which I happened to be the head. The corridors were crowded with dirty or sinister loafers interspersed with burly policemen. There were spitoons everywhere which served only a part of their purpose. The Mayor’s reception room was not unhandsome, but it was full of knots of whispering and sly-eyed political hangers-on, reporters, and more loafers, while the air was rank with tobacco-smoke. Presently the Mayor and Aldermen strolled in, hailing various individuals by nicknames and slang phrases, and disposed themselves at ease around a long table; some were in their shirt-sleeves, for it was a hot midsummer day. I was listened to politely enough, and the questions asked were not unintelligent; it was the attitude, the form, that was at fault. The whole thing was more like a social meeting of commercial travellers in the office of a country hotel than a session of the governing body of a great city.