machine of New York under David B. Hill, were probably even more efficient, representing an even more complete mastery by the bosses, and an even greater degree of drilled obedience among the henchmen.  It would be an entire mistake to suppose that Mr. Platt’s lieutenants were either all bad men or all influenced by unworthy motives.  He was constantly doing favors for men.  He had won the gratitude of many good men.  In the country districts especially, there were many places where his machine included the majority of the best citizens, the leading and substantial citizens, among the inhabitants.  Some of his strongest and most efficient lieutenants were disinterested men of high character.

There had always been a good deal of opposition to Mr. Platt and the machine, but the leadership of this opposition was apt to be found only among those whom Abraham Lincoln called the “silk stockings,” and much of it excited almost as much derision among the plain people as the machine itself excited anger or dislike.  Very many of Mr. Platt’s opponents really disliked him and his methods, for aesthetic rather than for moral reasons, and the bulk of the people half-consciously felt this and refused to submit to their leadership.  The men who opposed him in this manner were good citizens according to their lights, prominent in the social clubs and in philanthropic circles, men of means and often men of business standing.  They disliked coarse and vulgar politicians, and they sincerely reprobated all the shortcomings that were recognized by, and were offensive to, people of their own caste.  They had not the slightest understanding of the needs, interests, ways of thought, and convictions of the average small man; and the small man felt this, although he could not express it, and sensed that they were really not concerned with his welfare, and that they did not offer him anything materially better from his point of view than the machine.

When reformers of this type attempted to oppose Mr. Platt, they usually put up either some rather inefficient, well-meaning person, who bathed every day, and didn’t steal, but whose only good point was “respectability,” and who knew nothing of the great fundamental questions looming before us; or else they put up some big business man or corporation lawyer who was wedded to the gross wrong and injustice of our economic system, and who neither by personality nor by programme gave the ordinary plain people any belief that there was promise of vital good to them in the change.  The correctness of their view was proved by the fact that as soon as fundamental economic and social reforms were at stake the aesthetic, as distinguished from the genuinely moral, reformers, for the most part sided with the bosses against the people.