corporation, either from wickedness or folly, was unwilling to remedy.  Of the measures introduced in the interest of corporations there were also some that were proper and some that were improper.  The corrupt legislators, the “black horse cavalry,” as they were termed, would demand payment to vote as the corporations wished, no matter whether the bill was proper or improper.  Sometimes, if the bill was a proper one, the corporation would have the virtue or the strength of mind to refuse to pay for its passage, and sometimes it would not.

A very slight consideration of the above state of affairs will show how difficult it was at times to keep the issue clear, for honest and dishonest men were continually found side by side voting now against and now for a corporation measure, the one set from proper and the other set from grossly improper motives.  Of course part of the fault lay in the attitudes of outsiders.  It was very early borne in upon me that almost equal harm was done by indiscriminate defense of, and indiscriminate attack on, corporations.  It was hard to say whether the man who prided himself upon always antagonizing the corporations, or the man who, on the plea that he was a good conservative, always stood up for them, was the more mischievous agent of corruption and demoralization.

In one fight in the House over a bill as to which there was a bitter contest between two New York City street railway organizations, I saw lobbyists come down on the floor itself and draw venal men out into the lobbies with almost no pretense of concealing what they were doing.  In another case in which the elevated railway corporations of New York City, against the protest of the Mayor and the other local authorities, rushed through a bill remitting over half their taxes, some of the members who voted for the measure probably thought it was right; but every corrupt man in the House voted with them; and the man must indeed have been stupid who thought that these votes were given disinterestedly.

The effective fight against this bill for the revision of the elevated railway taxes—­perhaps the most openly crooked measure which during my time was pushed at Albany—­was waged by Mike Costello and myself.  We used to spend a good deal of time in industrious research into the various bills introduced, so as to find out what their authors really had in mind; this research, by the way, being highly unappreciated and much resented by the authors.  In the course of his researches Mike had been puzzled by an unimportant bill, seemingly related to a Constitutional amendment, introduced by a local saloon-keeper, whose interests, as far as we knew, were wholly remote from the Constitution, or from any form of abstract legal betterment.  However, the measure seemed harmless; we did not interfere; and it passed the House.  Mike, however, followed its career in the Senate, and at the last moment, almost by accident, discovered that it had been “amended”