find municipal life even more complex than this. The eager rivals who solicit the honour of doing your work for nothing are divided into bitterly hostile schools. Each school spends hundreds of thousands of pounds in a periodical effort to convince you that the other school is going to swindle you. Each plasters the wall with repulsive typical portraits of its opponents, and you see yourself depicted as a weak and amiable, but small-witted, figure (or, perhaps, as a burly and very stupid-looking farmer), whose pockets are being picked. Each produces a most exact statistical proof that its opponents have actually picked your pockets, and that the “reds” or “blues” are the only people with a really disinterested desire to spend some hours every day in the gratuitous discharge of public duties. They spend great sums of money every few years for the purpose of securing this thankless burden and facing the vituperation of their opponents. You seek illumination in the press, and you find, in rival journals, a mass of contradictory statements and mutual accusations of lying. However, the system is thoroughly British in its encouragement of individual action and public spirit, and you overlook all the direct and indirect corruption it fosters.
What is a man to do? One can at least search very rigorously the credentials and the public action of the man who “solicits your vote,” and encourage the appearance of really independent and fine-spirited men and women. I have, naturally,
