tested me.  Most of them like me.  I’ve lived among them for years.  I’ve gone on their summer excursions.  I’ve talked with them all over the district.  I have helped them in their troubles.  I have said a kind word over their dead.  I’m godfather to many.  With others I’ve stood shoulder to shoulder when the bullets were flying.  Why, the voters who were children when I first came here, with whom I use to sit in the angle, are almost numerous enough now to carry an election as I advise.  Do you suppose, because speakers, unknown to them, say I’m wrong, and because the three-cent papers, which they never see, abuse me, that they are going to turn from me unless I make them?  That is the true secret of the failure of reformers.  A logical argument is all right in a court of appeals, but when it comes to swaying five thousand votes, give me five thousand loving hearts rather than five thousand logical reasons.”

“Yet you have carried reforms.”

“I have tried, but always in a practical way.  That is, by not antagonizing the popular men in politics, but by becoming one of them and making them help me.  I have gained political power by recognizing that I could only have my own way by making it suit the voters.  You see there are a great many methods of doing about the same thing.  And the boss who does the most things that the people want, can do the most things that the people don’t want.  Every time I have surrendered my own wishes, and done about what the people desire, I have added to my power, and so have been able to do something that the people or politicians do not care about or did not like.”

“And as a result you are called all sorts of names.”

“Yes.  The papers call me a boss.  If the voters didn’t agree with me, they would call me a reformer.”

“But, Peter,” said Le Grand, “would you not like to see such a type of man as George William Curtis in office?”

“Mr. Curtis probably stood for the noblest political ideas this country has ever produced.  But he held a beacon only to a small class.  A man who writes from an easy-chair, will only sway easy-chair people.  And easy-chair people never carried an election in this country, and never will.  This country cannot have a government of the best.  It will always be a government of the average.  Mr. Curtis was only a leader to his own grade, just as Tim Sullivan is the leader of his.  Mr. Curtis, in his editorials, spoke the feelings of one element in America.  Sullivan, in Germania Hall, voices another.  Each is representative, the one of five per cent. of New York; the other of ninety-five per cent.  If the American people have decided one thing, it is that they will not be taken care of, nor coercively ruled, by their better element, or minorities.”

“Yet you will acknowledge that Curtis ought to rule, rather than Sullivan?”

“Not if our government is to be representative.  I need not say that I wish such a type as Mr. Curtis was representative.”