People wondered how any sane, intelligent community could tolerate the presence of a set of corrupt scoundrels like the twenty aldermen of the city.

Their names, it was said, were simply a byword throughout the United States for rank criminal corruption.

This was said so widely that everybody started hunting through the daily papers to try to find out who in blazes were aldermen, anyhow.

Twenty names are hard to remember, and as a matter of fact, at the moment when this wave of feeling struck the city, nobody knew or cared who were aldermen, anyway.
To tell the truth, the aldermen had been much the same persons for about fifteen or twenty years.

Some were in the produce business, others were butchers, two were grocers, and all of them wore blue checkered waistcoats and red ties and got up at seven in the morning to attend the vegetable and other markets.