rise by hypocrisy.  When I ran for Speaker, the whole body of machine politicians was against me, and my only chance lay in arousing the people in the different districts.  To do this I had to visit the districts, put the case fairly before the men whom I saw, and make them understand that I was really making a fight and would stay in the fight to the end.  Yet there were reformers who shook their heads and deplored my “activity” in the canvass.  Of course the one thing which corrupt machine politicians most desire is to have decent men frown on the activity, that is, on the efficiency, of the honest man who genuinely wishes to reform politics.

If efficiency is left solely to bad men, and if virtue is confined solely to inefficient men, the result cannot be happy.  When I entered politics there were, as there always had been—­and as there always will be—­any number of bad men in politics who were thoroughly efficient, and any number of good men who would like to have done lofty things in politics but who were thoroughly inefficient.  If I wished to accomplish anything for the country, my business was to combine decency and efficiency; to be a thoroughly practical man of high ideals who did his best to reduce those ideals to actual practice.  This was my ideal, and to the best of my ability I strove to live up to it.

To a young man, life in the New York Legislature was always interesting and often entertaining.  There was always a struggle of some kind on hand.  Sometimes it was on a naked question of right and wrong.  Sometimes it was on a question of real constructive statesmanship.  Moreover, there were all kinds of humorous incidents, the humor being usually of the unconscious kind.  In one session of the Legislature the New York City Democratic representatives were split into two camps, and there were two rivals for leadership.  One of these was a thoroughly good-hearted, happy-go-lucky person who was afterwards for several years in Congress.  He had been a local magistrate and was called Judge.  Generally he and I were friendly, but occasionally I did something that irritated him.  He was always willing to vote for any other member’s bill himself, and he regarded it as narrow-minded for any one to oppose one of his bills, especially if the opposition was upon the ground that it was unconstitutional—­for his views of the Constitution were so excessively liberal as to make even me feel as if I belonged to the straitest sect of strict constructionists.  On one occasion he had a bill to appropriate money, with obvious impropriety, for the relief of some miscreant whom he styled “one of the honest yeomanry of the State.”  When I explained to him that it was clearly unconstitutional, he answered, “Me friend, the Constitution don’t touch little things like that,” and then added, with an ingratiating smile, “Anyhow, I’d never allow the Constitution to come between friends.”  At the time I was looking over the proofs of Mr. Bryce’s “American Commonwealth,” and I told him the incident.  He put it into the first edition of the “Commonwealth”; whether it is in the last edition or not, I cannot say.