Jake Hess was entirely good-humored about it.  In spite of my being anti-machine, my relations with him had been friendly and human, and when he was beaten he turned in to help Joe elect me.  At first they thought they would take me on a personal canvass through the saloons along Sixth Avenue.  The canvass, however, did not last beyond the first saloon.  I was introduced with proper solemnity to the saloon-keeper—­a very important personage, for this was before the days when saloon-keepers became merely the mortgaged chattels of the brewers—­and he began to cross-examine me, a little too much in the tone of one who was dealing with a suppliant for his favor.  He said he expected that I would of course treat the liquor business fairly; to which I answered, none too cordially, that I hoped I should treat all interests fairly.  He then said that he regarded the licenses as too high; to which I responded that I believed they were really not high enough, and that I should try to have them made higher.  The conversation threatened to become stormy.  Messrs. Murray and Hess, on some hastily improvised plea, took me out into the street, and then Joe explained to me that it was not worth my while staying in Sixth Avenue any longer, that I had better go right back to Fifth Avenue and attend to my friends there, and that he would look after my interests on Sixth Avenue.  I was triumphantly elected.

Once before Joe had interfered in similar fashion and secured the nomination of an Assemblyman; and shortly after election he had grown to feel toward this Assemblyman that he must have fed on the meat which rendered Caesar proud, as he became inaccessible to the ordinary mortals whose place of resort was Morton Hall.  He eyed me warily for a short time to see if I was likely in this respect to follow in my predecessor’s footsteps.  Finding that I did not, he and all my other friends and supporters assumed toward me the very pleasantest attitude that it was possible to assume.  They did not ask me for a thing.  They accepted as a matter of course the view that I was absolutely straight and was trying to do the best I could in the Legislature.  They desired nothing except that I should make a success, and they supported me with hearty enthusiasm.  I am a little at a loss to know quite how to express the quality in my relationship with Joe Murray and my other friends of this period which rendered that relationship so beneficial to me.  When I went into politics at this time I was not conscious of going in with the set purpose to benefit other people, but of getting for myself a privilege to which I was entitled in common with other people.  So it was in my relationship with these men.  If there had lurked in the innermost recesses of my mind anywhere the thought that I was in some way a patron or a benefactor, or was doing something noble by taking part in politics, or that I expected the smallest consideration save what I could earn on my own merits, I am certain that