Mike Costello had been elected as a Tammany man.  He was as fearless as he was honest.  He came from Ireland, and had accepted the Tammany Fourth of July orations as indicating the real attitude of that organization towards the rights of the people.  A month or two in Albany converted him to a profound distrust of applied Tammany methods.  He and I worked hand in hand with equal indifference to our local machines.  His machine leaders warned him fairly that they would throw him out at the next election, which they did; but he possessed a seasoned-hickory toughness of ability to contend with adverse circumstances, and kept his head well above water.  A better citizen does not exist; and our friendship has never faltered.

Peter Kelly’s fate was a tragedy.  He was a bright, well-educated young fellow, an ardent believer in Henry George.  At the beginning he and I failed to understand each other or to get on together, for our theories of government were radically opposed.  After a couple of months spent in active contests with men whose theories had nothing whatever to do with their practices, Kelly and I found in our turn that it really did not make much difference what our abstract theories were on questions that were not before the Legislature, in view of the fact that on the actual matters before the Legislature, the most important of which involved questions of elementary morality, we were heartily at one.  We began to vote together and act together, and by the end of the session found that in all practical matters that were up for action we thought together.  Indeed, each of us was beginning to change his theories, so that even in theory we were coming closer together.  He was ardent and generous; he was a young lawyer, with a wife and children, whose ambition had tempted him into politics, and who had been befriended by the local bosses under the belief that they could count upon him for anything they really wished.  Unfortunately, what they really wished was often corrupt.  Kelly defied them, fought the battles of the people with ardor and good faith, and when the bosses refused him a renomination, he appealed from them to the people.  When we both came up for reelection, I won easily in my district, where circumstances conspired to favor me; and Kelly, with exactly the same record that I had, except that it was more creditable because he took his stand against greater odds, was beaten in his district.  Defeat to me would have meant merely chagrin; to Kelly it meant terrible material disaster.  He had no money.  Like every rigidly honest man, he had found that going into politics was expensive and that his salary as Assemblyman did not cover the financial outgo.  He had lost his practice and he had incurred the ill will of the powerful, so that it was impossible at the moment to pick up his practice again; and the worry and disappointment affected him so much that shortly after election he was struck down by sickness.  Just before Christmas some of