A Woman for Mayor | Page 7

turned from the telephone, Bailey Armstrong was entering.
"Well, well, what's this I hear?" he exclaimed, coming forward with outstretched hand. "You'll have Roma shaken to its foundations if you keep on.--And I suppose you'll keep on?" he added, with a keen look into her eyes.
"I am my father's daughter," she replied, and led the way into the library, where she told him her latest news.
"I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't been there last night myself," said Bailey. "There was a pretty hot discussion. Some of us want to help you, but the majority want a precedent back of them. And there's no precedent for a woman-mayor, you know. Say, Gertie, are you fully determined to run?--because the Augean stables aren't exactly what you've been accustomed to,--and that's what you will find."
"I'm fully determined," answered the other quietly.
"That settles it, then," said the young man. "Now let's plan out the work."
"Then you're going to help, Bailey."
"Sure thing. Want me?"
"Of course we do."
"Not 'we,' Gertie,--I," he answered in a voice as quiet and as determined as hers. "Now, I've been through several campaigns and am not only a good fighter, but I'm conceited enough to believe I'm a pretty good organizer,--and that's a hundred times better."
"Well, tell me just how to go to work to enlist the multitude, to win the populace;--in short, to get votes," said Gertrude. "How do I begin?"
"Well, there are two ways," answered the young man. "If you were a man I would say, you can break in by sheer force of audacity, without definite purpose; or, you can enter quietly, with a fixed principle in mind which you wish to see worked out in public life. The first is the old idea, the latter is the new."
"And the old way?" said Gertrude.
"Well, if you enter in the old-fashioned way, you will have to place yourself at the disposal of the chairman of some campaign committee in the city; you will read a great deal of 'literature' prepared by the committee, mostly vituperative nonsense about the opposing party; you will learn this by heart, follow the red light and the brass band to the nearest 'stump,' and mixing what you have read, but not thought out, with some stories of considerable age and questionable humor, will deliver it all to a bored and weary audience, confident that you have established a reputation for eloquence.
"By this time you will feel like a full-fledged politician; you will become mysterious and tell everybody everything you know in confidence; secret conferences will be held behind closed doors; old clothes and a slouchy manner will be brought out to catch the labor vote; you will speak to all sorts of people, and call them by their first names, thinking all the time that, if a candidate, you would lead your ticket. As a matter of fact, you may have lost hundreds of votes."
"Yes," said Gertrude with spirit, "and then I would be taken up by the machine. They would call me a budding genius and I should look upon the boss as a great man."
"Yes," pursued Bailey, "until you begin to think for yourself. Then it will occur to you as strange that in a representative government you should be selected as a candidate of your party recommended as you have been; still more strange that the platform upon which you are to run was set up in type in the newspaper offices several hours before the convention which nominates you met, and had been submitted to the president of the railroad that runs through your town for his approval or revision."
"Yes,--and then," broke in Gertrude, "some day by accident, if I take the trouble to read at all I shall notice in a statute a little clause concealed in fifty pages of meaningless verbiage, which grants an unjust and special privilege to certain interests closely connected with the dominant party in state politics. I shall be unable to reconcile this law with my ideas of fair play and justice, and it will occur to me that possibly it is a mistake, which can easily be remedied by appealing to the 'party leaders.'"
"And so you protest," Bailey chimed in, "and in your sweet and charming innocence you suggest that this law be amended and the special privilege abolished. The bland smile that greets your remark will get on your nerves, and you will sit down to think it over; and when you have cleared your brain of cobwebs, you will realize for the first time that machine politics, to which you have been an unconscious party, has nothing whatever to do with ideas, principles or policies, but is purely a game of money in its last analysis; that it is a scheme to enrich a few at the expense of the