If after repeated and persistent effort I failed to get them to support me, then I made a fair fight in the open, and in a majority of cases I carried my point and succeeded in getting through the legislation which I wished.  In theory the Executive has nothing to do with legislation.  In practice, as things now are, the Executive is or ought to be peculiarly representative of the people as a whole.  As often as not the action of the Executive offers the only means by which the people can get the legislation they demand and ought to have.  Therefore a good executive under the present conditions of American political life must take a very active interest in getting the right kind of legislation, in addition to performing his executive duties with an eye single to the public welfare.  More than half of my work as Governor was in the direction of getting needed and important legislation.  I accomplished this only by arousing the people, and riveting their attention on what was done.

Gradually the people began to wake up more and more to the fact that the machine politicians were not giving them the kind of government which they wished.  As this waking up grew more general, not merely in New York or any other one State, but throughout most of the Nation, the power of the bosses waned.  Then a curious thing happened.  The professional reformers who had most loudly criticized these bosses began to change toward them.  Newspaper editors, college presidents, corporation lawyers, and big business men, all alike, had denounced the bosses and had taken part in reform movements against them so long as these reforms dealt only with things that were superficial, or with fundamental things that did not affect themselves and their associates.  But the majority of these men turned to the support of the bosses when the great new movement began clearly to make itself evident as one against privilege in business no less than against privilege in politics, as one for social and industrial no less than for political righteousness and fair dealing.  The big corporation lawyer who had antagonized the boss in matters which he regarded as purely political stood shoulder to shoulder with the boss when the movement for betterment took shape in direct attack on the combination of business with politics and with the judiciary which has done so much to enthrone privilege in the economic world.

The reformers who denounced political corruption and fraud when shown at the expense of their own candidates by machine ward heelers of a low type hysterically applauded similar corrupt trickery when practiced by these same politicians against men with whose political and industrial programme the reformers were not in sympathy.  I had always been instinctively and by nature a democrat, but if I had needed conversion to the democratic ideal here in America the stimulus would have been supplied by what I saw of the attitude, not merely of the bulk of the men of greatest wealth,