In ordinary times that would not have mattered, but the times were very far from ordinary. War was making still sterner demands, week by week, upon every man and woman in the country. Blackhampton had done much, as every town in England had, but its temporal directors felt that no effort must be relaxed, and that it was ever increasingly their duty "to keep it up to the collar." And Josiah Munt now filled the popular mind.
The very qualities which in the gentler days, not so long ago, had aroused antagonism were at a premium now. For superfine people the Mayor was a full-blooded representative of a distressing type, but it was now the reign of King Demos: all over the island from Westminster itself to the parish hall of Little Pedlington-in-the-Pound the Josiah Munts of the earth had come at last by their own. On every public platform and in every newspaper was to be found a Josiah Munt haranguing the natives at the top of his voice, thereby guaranteeing his political vision and his mental capacity. King Demos is not a rose born to blush unseen; he knows everything about everything and he is not ashamed to say so. With a fraction of his colossal mind he can conduct the most delicate and far-reaching military operations, involving millions of men, and countless tons of machinery to which even a Napoleon or a Clausewitz might be expected to give his undivided attention; with another he is able to insure that the five million dogs of the island, mainly untaxed, shall continue to pollute the unscavengered streets of its most populous cities; with another he is able to devise a Ministry of Health; with another he can pick his way through the maze of world politics, and recast the map of Europe and Asia on a basis to endure until the crack of doom; with yet another he can devise a new handle for the parish pump.
King Demos is indeed a bright fellow. And in Mr. Josiah Munt he found an ideal representative. Happily for Blackhampton, although there were places of even greater importance who in this respect were not so well off, he was a man of rude honesty. He said what he meant and he meant what he said; he was no believer in graft, he did not willfully mislead; he was not a seeker of cheap applause; and in matters of the public purse he had a certain amount of public conscience. As Mr. Aylett the town clerk said in the course of a private conversation with Mr. Druce the chairman of the Finance Committee, "His worship is not everybody's pretty boy, but just now we are lucky to have him and we ought to be thankful that he is the clean potato."