The Differences in Method. 
335 
■unable to brook opposition. Transplanted into the sphere of 
public life he finds that he must accommodate himself to others; 
must seek to convince or at least to persuade them; must some¬ 
times give way to their desires, at other times submit to com¬ 
promises. All this he must do while being exposed to the 
criticism of all who choose to criticise, from the newspapers 
down to the loafers at the street corner, a criticism which is 
nearly always ignorant and sometimes malignant. All this is 
entirely foreign to anything he has experienced in his business 
career. * If he is a man of mature years, as is usually the case, 
he is not likely to have the power of adapting himself to the 
new conditions. * His old habits at one time lead him into an¬ 
noying conflicts with his associates; at another they cause the 
defeat of his measures, notwithstanding their intrinsic excel¬ 
lence. By and by his usefulness disappears, and the “business 
man’s candidate,” the man who perhaps was carried into office 
by a sincere popular desire for reform, and whose election was 
expected to be the beginning of a new era, retires into private 
life glad if his record is nothing worse than that of failure. 
These things have happened in every community. The fault 
does not lie in our system of government, but in the folly of 
imagining that a business training is the best school of the 
public administrative officer. 
The question naturally arises: Where can such training be 
had as will fit a man for public administrative duties? The an¬ 
swer should be: In administrative office. No man can, generally 
speaking, be a good mayor unless he has first been an aider- 
man, or has served in some other capacity of a similar nature. If 
you find a man who thinks the acceptance of such comparatively 
insignificant positions beneath his dignity, you may feel assured 
that he is unfit to hold a higher one. The next best school of 
the public official is in the caucus, the ward committee, the con¬ 
vention, in brief, in the entire complex work by which elections 
are carried. For there also he will learn to act in connection 
with others who are his equals, to persuade and allow himself 
to be persuaded. Not that such training alone can be sufficient; 
but if he is otherwise qualified, the aspirant for public life will 
