The night preceding election ended the campaign, for the enemy at least, in a blaze of glory, so to speak.  Dozens of speakers for both causes were about the street corners and in the city meeting room.

Oratory poured forth in streams, and gasoline-lighted band-wagons rattled from street to street, emitting song and invective.  Even a great parade was arranged by the anti-mayoral forces, in which horses and men to the number of hundreds were brought in from nearby cities and palmed off as enthusiastic citizens.

“Horses don’t vote,” a watchword handed out by the mayor, took the edge off the extreme ardor of this invading throng, and set to laughing the hundreds of his partisans, who needed such encouragement.

Next day came the vote, and then for once, anyhow, he was justified.  Not only was a much larger vote cast than ever, but he thrashed the enemy with a tail of two hundred votes to spare.  It was an inspiring victory from one point of view, but rather doleful for the enemy.  The latter had imported a carload of fireworks, which now stood sadly unused upon the very tracks which, apparently, must in the future be raised.  The crowning insult was offered when the successful forces offered to take them off their hands at half price.

For a year thereafter (a mayor was elected yearly there), less was heard of the commercial destruction of the city.  Gas stood, as decided, at eighty cents a thousand.  A new manual training school, built at a very nominal cost, a monument to municipal honesty, was also in evidence.  The public waterworks had also been enlarged and the rates reduced.  The streets were clean.

Then the mayor made another innovation.  During his first term of office there had been a weekly meeting of the reform club, at which he appeared and talked freely of his plans and difficulties.  These meetings he now proposed to make public.

Every Wednesday evening for a year thereafter a spectacle of municipal self-consciousness was witnessed, which those who saw it felt sure would redound to the greater strength and popularity of the mayor.  In a large hall, devoted to public gatherings, a municipal meeting was held.  Every one was invited.  The mayor was both host and guest, an individual who chose to explain his conduct and his difficulties and to ask advice.  There his constituents gathered, not only to hear but to offer counsel.

“Gentlemen,” so ran the gist of his remarks on various of these occasions, “the present week has proved a most trying one.  I am confronted by a number of difficult problems, which I will now try to explain to you.  In the first place, you know my limitations as to power in the council.  But three members now vote for me, and it is only by mutual concessions that we move forward at all.”