The mayor sat before his library fire and shivered, and kept wondering why there was no clause in the city charter prescribing a minimum of common sense for presidents of the Board of Education. A man thus qualified would know more than to suggest an increase of three million dollars for school sittings. The city's comptroller was crying bankruptcy; the newspapers were asserting that the mayor's nephew was head of a favoured contracting firm not entirely for his health; and the Board of Education wanted three million dollars. The mayor had a touch of fever. The steep rows of figures in the Education Board's memorandum curled up into little arabesques under his eyes, which were closing with fatigue. Only he did not wish to sleep. In the perfect stillness he could hear his own rapid heartbeat. The clatter of sleety rain against the windows made him restless.

If only O'Brien were here, O'Brien, who was a good chief of police, and a matchless personal aide-de-camp. They would then put on boots and oilskins and go out into the night on one of their frequent Harun-Al-Rashid expeditions. The mayor's wife? Yes, it is true that before leaving for the theatre she had cautioned him not to stir from the house. But she could not possibly have known how great was his need of a breath of air. But O'Brien was not here. Was it because he had just been appointed president of the Board of Education and comptroller in one and was a busy man? Perhaps. And yet a person might step to the telephone and ring up O'Brien if it were not that one's legs were weighted down with the weight of centuries and of dozens of new school buildings all in reinforced concrete. Was it concrete? The mayor was not quite sure, and he turned to ask O'Brien, who stood there at one side of the fireplace, erect and attentive.

"Do we go out to-night?" said the mayor.

"I should not advise it, your Honour," answered O'Brien. "You are not well enough. If it is adventure you would go in search of, I have here quite an extraordinary delegation of citizens who desire an interview with your Honour."

"Let us hear them, by all means," replied the mayor.

O'Brien drew aside the curtain which divided the library from the general reception room and there marched in, two abreast and maintaining precise step, a solemn line of children, who saluted the mayor gravely and ranged themselves in a semicircle across the room. As the mayor veered in his chair to face his visitors, a girl of some fifteen years stepped out of the line. She was still in her schoolgirl's dresses, but tall, with features of a fine, pensive cut and earnest eyes that were already peering from out the child's life into the opening doors of womanhood.

"May it please your Honour," she began, "we are a committee from the Central Bureau of Federated Children's Organisations and we have come here to protest against certain intolerable conditions of which our members are the victims."

Had they come in behalf of those additional three million dollars, the mayor wondered uneasily. "State the nature of your grievance," he said.

The leader of the delegation came a step nearer. "Your Honour, I can only attempt the merest outline of our general position. Several of my associates will take turns in acquainting you with the details of our case. Our complaint is that we, the children of this country, are being overworked. Formerly it was supposed to be the inalienable right of children to remain free from the cares of life. That theory has long been abandoned. The task of solving the gravest problems of existence has been thrust upon us, and every day that passes leaves us saddled with new responsibilities. But the limit of endurance has been reached at last. We feel that unless we protest now the whole structure of society—its economics, politics, art, and religion—will be shifted from the shoulders of the world's men and women to the shoulders of us children. I hope your Honour is willing to hear us."

"Of course, my dear," the mayor answered softly. He said, "My dear," and he said it tenderly because he had recognised in the speaker his own daughter Helen, whom he had supposed with her mother at the theatre.

"Step forward, Flora Binns," said Helen, and Flora Binns, who was only eight, blue-eyed, and with ringlets of gold, approached and curtsied prettily. "May it please your Honour," she said, "I am the delegate from Local No. 16 Children of Weak and Tempted Stage Mothers' Union. We wish to place on record our opposition to the modern society drama, which so frequently throws the duty of supporting the climax of a play upon children under the age of ten. Although the playwrights are fond of showing that our papa is a brute and that our mamma is an angel, they invariably shrink from the logical conclusion that our mamma is right in planning to run away with the man who has offered her years of silent devotion. So the playwrights make one or two of us appear on the stage just in time to arouse in our mamma a sense of duty to her children and to prevent the elopement. Now we submit that the office of justifying our entire modern marriage fabric is too burdensome for us. Don't you think so, Mr. Mayor?"

"Why, yes," replied the mayor, thoughtfully.

"And they make use of us in other ways, sir. In fact, whenever the grown up persons in a play are in difficulties and the audience is beginning to yawn, the author sends us to the rescue. Why, only the other day we children saved a Wild West melodrama from utter failure. It took three of us to do it, but we succeeded." Flora curtsied, started back and returned. "And when I utter these sentiments, sir, I speak also for the Union of Precocious Magazine Children, which is represented here by Mary Sparks." Mary Sparks, a dark-haired miss with dancing eyes, bowed saucily.

"Step out, Fritz Hackenschneider," said Helen, and flaxen-haired Fritz, radiantly holiday-like in his lustrously washed face and large, blue polka-dot tie, approached the mayor's chair.

"I don't have much to say, sir," he recited in a nervous, jerky voice. "I have been sent by the Fraternal Association of Comic Supplement Children. We wish to raise our voice against the almost universal conception that people can be made to laugh only when one of us hides a pin on the seat of grandpa's chair. The burden of an entire nation's humour is more than we can sustain. Thank you, sir," and he retired into the background, giving, as he passed, just one tug at Mary Sparks's hair and eliciting a suppressed scream.

"Mamie O'Farrell," called out Helen. The mayor found it impossible to decide whether Mamie was thirteen or twenty-five. She was very short and flat-chested, and the colour of her face in the firelight was like a dull cardboard. She wore a long, faded automobile cloak and an enormous black hat with a trailing green feather. On a gilt chain about her neck hung a locket in the form of a heart half as large as the one that beat uneasily within her. Mamie came forward reluctantly and saluted. Then she began to squirm from side to side and to shift from foot to foot, giggling in unfathomable embarrassment.

"Well," said Helen, in a voice that was not at all unkind.

Mamie's giggle grew worse. She seemed bent on snapping the massive gilt chain with twisting it back and forth, and finally gave up the whole case. "You tell it, Helen," she begged. "I forgot wot I was goin' t' say. I'm scared poifectly stiff."

Helen complied. "May it please your Honour, Mamie O'Farrell wants me to say that she represents the Amalgamated Union of Cash Girls and Juvenile Cotton Mill and Glass Factory Operatives. Mamie is fifteen. She works eleven hours a day and receives three and a half dollars a week. She passes two hours every day clinging to a strap in a crowded surface car. She carries her lunch in a paper bundle together with a copy of Laura M. Clay's novel entitled 'Irma's Ducal Lover.' Saturday nights, if her father has been strong enough to pass Murphy's saloon without opening his pay envelope, she goes to the theatre where the play is 'The Queen of the Opium Fiends.' Sometimes she attends a dance of the Friendship Circle, but as a rule she spends her nights at home reading the Evening Yell, which tells her that beauty is often a fatal gift and that there is danger in the first glass of champagne a young girl drinks. Am I telling your story in the right way, Mamie?" asked Helen.

"Goodness, yes. You're awful kind, Helen," said Mamie.

"Thus far, Mamie has nothing to complain of," continued Helen. "But she has read somewhere that the slaughter of the poor negroes in the Congo and of the Chinese in Manchuria, and of the Zulus in Natal, and of the Moros in the Philippines, arises from the necessity under which the civilised nations labour to find foreign markets for their increasing output of cotton goods, brass jewelry, and coloured beads. Now the members of Mamie's union are engaged in producing precisely those commodities, and they have come to feel in consequence, that they are directly responsible for the innocent blood that is being shed in various parts of the world. It cannot be their employers who are at fault, because the press and the clergy are unanimous in declaring that the heads of our great industries are the benefactors of humankind. That is why the girls protest. They are quite content with their own fate, but they cannot bear the entire responsibility for the march of civilisation. Mamie tells me that she cannot sleep of nights for thinking of the poor little Moorish babies whose mothers were killed by the French guns. That is the position taken by your union, isn't it, Mamie?"

Mamie giggled, went through a final contortion of ill-ease and returned to her place, in the half-circle. She was succeeded by a brown-haired little maiden, who for some minutes had been showing a strained anxiety to break into speech.

"Please, Helen," she entreated, "may I say something?"

"Of course, dear," said Helen.

The little maid bowed to the mayor. "Please, sir," she said, "my papa was thirty-eight years of age when he married mamma. He was an old bachelor. He was not anxious to be married, but they put a tax on him because they were afraid of depopulation. And he loves me very dearly. But sometimes when he thinks of his old freedom he looks so sadly at me. I feel very sorry for him then. I don't want him to be unhappy on my account——"

She withdrew and Helen stepped forward to sum up the case. "You must not think, your Honour, that it is our desire to embarrass your administration. Bad as conditions are, we would have continued to suffer in silence, because, you see, there are still little flashes of freedom left to us children. But we have learned that there is now on foot in England a movement which threatens to reduce us to unmitigated slavery. We understand that Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr. Francis Galton, Professor Karl Pearson, and Mr. Bernard Shaw are advocating a scheme of state endowment for motherhood. Now you can see for yourself what that would mean. In politics it would mean the establishment of a motherhood suffrage with plural voting based on the size of the family. In the economic sphere it would mean that we shall be supporting our papas and mammas. In art, which must reflect the actualities of life, it would mean almost the elimination of the element of love, since the world is to be a children's world. In other words, as I have already said, the entire social fabric will come to press on our shoulders alone. It is against the mere possibility of such an unnatural state of affairs that we are here to protest."

"But what is it you want?" asked the mayor, somewhat nettled because O'Brien, instead of backing him up, was busy piling three million golden dollars on the floor in stacks two and a half feet high.

"We want to be left alone!" The reply came in a chorus of trebles, pipings, quavers, and adolescent falsettos that caused the mayor to lift his hands to his forehead entreating silence. "We want our old privileges again. We want to be allowed just to grow up."

"Yassir," shrilled one voice above the others, "jist to grow up."

The mayor raised himself in his chair and his eyes lit up with surprise at the sight of a well-known black little face at the very end of the second row.

"What, Topsy, you here?" he called out. "Haven't you done growing all these sixty years, nearly?"

"Yassir," answered Topsy, inserting an index finger into her mouth. "Ah was shure growin' fas'; but Massa Booker Washin'ton he says that ah and the likes of me was charged with th' future of the negro race. An' that skyeered me so ah made up mah mind ah wouldn' grow no further."

The mayor turned to Helen. "You understand of course, my dear, that I cannot lay a proposition of so vague a nature before the Board of Aldermen. They are a rather unimaginative set of men."

"We have drawn up a list of demands, your Honour, in terms precise enough to make it a sufficient basis for practical legislation. May I read the list to you, papa?"

"Yes, my dear," he replied, and rising from his chair he put his arms about her and kissed her. Her forehead was cool to his burning lips. "Pray proceed, Miss Chairman."

And Helen read in her high-pitched, petulantly graceful soprano: "Resolutions adopted at a special meeting of the Central Bureau of the Federated Children's Organisations of the United States:

"1. Henceforth the proportion of child fiction in any magazine shall be restricted to ten per cent. of the total contents of such publication; and no magazine fiction child under the age of twelve shall be represented as possessing an amount of intelligence greater than the combined wisdom of its parents.

"2. The married heroine of a society drama who has consistently preferred yachting trips, bridge, and the opera to the company of her children shall be precluded from calling upon them for aid to save herself from the dangers of a mad infatuation.

"3. Children under the age of eighteen shall be employed in no form of industry whatsoever. If there are not enough hands to produce piece goods for the Congo and the Philippines, let them draft all adult motor-car chauffeurs, diamond polishers, wine agents, amateur coach drivers, settlement workers, preachers of the simple life, and writers of musical comedy.

"4. In the public schools there shall be no talks or lessons dealing with the duties of citizenship. The time now given to that subject shall be devoted to the reading of dime novels and fairy tales, so that on graduating, children shall not be confronted with so startling a contrast between the realities of life and what they have learned at school.

"5. Cooking and other branches of domestic science shall no longer be taught in the schools. One-half of us expect to live in family hotels and the other half will probably be in no position to afford the expensive ingredients employed in scientific cookery.

"6. Mr. Francis Galton, who invented Eugenics, and Messrs. Karl Pearson and Sidney Webb, who helped to popularise it, shall be executed. Mr. Bernard Shaw shall be banished to a desert island."

And the mayor all the while kept thinking how like her mother Helen was: her voice, her hair, her eyes, but especially her voice. It filled the room with many-coloured vibrations of the consistency of building concrete and hid completely from the mayor's sight the crowd of young faces, O'Brien, the Board of Aldermen, and the three million presidents of the Board of Education. Only Helen remained and she came close to him and laid her cool fingers on his aching head.

The mayor started up to find his wife bending over him.

"Edward," she was saying, "you promised me you would go to bed early."

"My dear," he replied, "I would have if I had not fallen asleep in my chair. Have you had a pleasant evening at the theatre?"

"It is dreadful weather," she said, "and I have a bit of cold. I suppose I shouldn't have gone out to-night, but it was the last chance, and you know the children would see 'Peter Pan.'"