It is difficult both to interpret sympathetically the motives and ideals
of those who have acquired rules of conduct in experience widely
different from our own, and also to take enough care in guarding the
gains already made, and in valuing highly enough the imperfect good so
painfully acquired and, at the best, so mixed with evil. This wide
difference in daily experience exhibits itself in two distinct attitudes
toward politics. The well-to-do men of the community think of politics
as something off by itself; they may conscientiously recognize political
duty as part of good citizenship, but political effort is not the
expression of their moral or social life. As a result of this
detachment, "reform movements," started by business men and the better
element, are almost wholly occupied in the correction of political
machinery and with a concern for the better method of administration,
rather than with the ultimate purpose of securing the welfare of the
people. They fix their attention so exclusively on methods that they
fail to consider the final aims of city government. This accounts for
the growing tendency to put more and more responsibility upon executive
officers and appointed commissions at the expense of curtailing the
power of the direct representatives of the voters. Reform movements tend
to become negative and to lose their educational value for the mass of
the people. The reformers take the rôle of the opposition. They give
themselves largely to criticisms of the present state of affairs, to
writing and talking of what the future must be and of certain results
which should be obtained. In trying to better matters, however, they
have in mind only political achievements which they detach in a curious
way from the rest of life, and they speak and write of the purification
of politics as of a thing set apart from daily life.

On the other hand, the real leaders of the people are part of the entire
life of the community which they control, and so far as they are