The dissatisfied roar that followed was not long in making itself heard all over the city.

“Stuff and nonsense,” yelled the office jobbers in a chorus.  “Socialism!” “Anarchy!” “This thing must be put down!” “The city would be bankrupt in a year.”  “No contractor could afford to pay his ordinary day laborers two a day.  The city could not afford to pay any contractor enough to do it.”

“The prosperity of the city is not greater than the prosperity of the largest number of its component individuals,” replied the mayor, in a somewhat altruistic and economically abstruse argument on the floor of the council hall.  “We must find contractors.”

“We’ll see about that,” said the members of the opposition.  “Why, the man’s crazy.  If he thinks he can run this town on a goody-good basis and make everybody rich and happy, he’s going to get badly fooled, that’s all there is to that.”

Fortunately for him three of the eight council members were fellows of the mayor’s own economic beliefs, individuals elected on the same ticket with him.  These men could not carry a resolution, but they could stop one from being carried over the mayor’s veto.  Hence it was found that if the contracts could not be given to men satisfactory to the mayor they could not be given at all, and he stood in a fair way to win.

“What the hell’s the use of us sitting here day after day!” were the actual words of the leading members of the opposition in the council some weeks later, when the fight became wearisome.  “We can’t pass the contracts over his veto.  I say let ’em go.”

So the proviso was tacked on, that two a day was the minimum wage to be allowed, and the contracts passed.

The mayor’s followers were exceedingly jubilant at this, more so than he, who was of a more cautious and less hopeful temperament.

“Not out of the woods yet, gentlemen,” he remarked to a group of his adherents at the reform club.  “We have to do a great many things sensibly if we expect to keep the people’s confidence and ‘win again.’”

Under the old system of letting contracts, whenever there was a wage rate stipulated, men were paid little or nothing, and the work was not done.  There was no pretense of doing it.  Garbage and ashes accumulated, and papers littered the streets.  The old contractor who had pocketed the appropriated sum thought to do so again.

“I hear the citizens are complaining as much as ever,” said the mayor to this individual one morning.  “You will have to keep the streets clean.”

The contractor, a robust, thick-necked, heavy-jawed Irishman, of just so much refinement as the sudden acquisition of a comfortable fortune would allow, looked him quizzically over, wondering whether he was “out” for a portion of the appropriation or whether he was really serious.

“We can fix that between us,” he said.

“There’s nothing to fix,” replied the mayor.  “All I want you to do is to clean the streets.”