POLITICAL NOTES
In the harbor of Manhattan, two bargees stirred sleepily last week. It was only about eleven o'clock in the morning and the bargees, who had gone to bed at ten the night before, were drowsing until it became time to eat their supper. One of them mumbled a curse and sat up angry and bewildered. Soon his companion did likewise; the two stared at each other with alarm and annoyance, for the air was full of strange noises. Whistles, sirens, funnels, horns, bells, squealers, filled the morning with a troublesome cacophony. Suddenly one bargee shook his fist: "It's that lazy bum Walker," the bargee said, "now he's back!" "Yes, the loafer," said the other bargee. Then both bargees moved into a shady place on the deck, for it was a hot September forenoon, and returned to somnolence.
What was to the bargees merely an unwarranted disturbance of early morning comfort, was, to newspapers, material for front pages desecrated by a lack of transoceanic flights and prizefights. The man so scornfully described by the lazy fellows, was in reality James J. Walker, Mayor of New York, who had been abroad for two months. Surely the adjectives applied by the bargees were out of order; they had read, no doubt, in spare moments, accounts of the Mayor's whiskey-tippling in England, his beer-drinking in Germany, his liquid luncheons in Italy, his wine-bibbing in France and his miscellaneous guzzlings in bars and on trains elsewhere. But they had not read the Mayor's most recent wireless message from on board the Ile de France: "It was to get a broader and more comprehensive view of city problems and their correction that I have traveled many miles through Europe and worked hard in my search for a rest."
To reporters, Mayor Walker said, as he drew near to New York, "I studied housing, hospitals, water-supply and transit. . . . I never had time to ride on the subways. I always wanted to, but there was always something else going on. . . . The funniest thing that happened to me abroad was the most pathetic. For two weeks I've been refusing good drinks." "How often?" asked incredulous newsgatherers. "Continuously." "Why?" "Hell," said the Mayor of New York, "you spoil it by asking why. I was sick!" Later the Mayor of New York said: "The greatest thrill of my life was when I knelt at the feet of the temporal head of the church in Rome."