The President of the City Council, a business man of education,
tact, and sincerity, became mayor, for an interim of four months;
enough time, as it proved, for him to return the city to its
normal political life.

These examples are sufficient to illustrate the organization and
working of the municipal machine. It must not be imagined by the
reader that these cities alone, and a few others made notorious
by the magazine muck-rakers, are the only American cities that
have developed oligarchies. In truth, not a single American city,
great or small, has entirely escaped, for a greater or lesser
period, the sway of a coterie of politicians. It has not always
been a corrupt sway; but it has rarely, if ever, given efficient
administration.

Happily there are not wanting signs that the general conditions
which have fostered the Ring are disappearing. The period of
reform set in about 1890, when people began to be interested in
the study of municipal government. It was not long afterwards
that the first authoritative books on the subject appeared. Then
colleges began to give courses in municipal government; editors
began to realize the public's concern in local questions and to
discuss neighborhood politics as well as national politics. By
1900 a new era broke--the era of the Grand Jury. Nothing so
hopeful in local politics had occurred in our history as the
disclosures which followed. They provoked the residuum of
conscience in the citizenry and the determination that honesty
should rule in public business and politics as well as in private
transactions. The Grand Jury inquisitions, however, demonstrated