“Well, they are not exactly fools, are they?” was the evasive answer.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” the elder man continued. “I am perfectly aware that the organization is not so black as it is painted. The men at the head of it are not a crew of pirates, as you say—of course not; if they were they would have been made to walk the plank long ago. Probably they mean well, as you say again. I should be sorry to believe that they do not.”
“Well, then—” returned Van Dyne.
But the Judge went on, regardless of what the young lawyer was going to say:
“They may mean well, but what of it if the result is what we see? The fact is that the men at the head of the organization are of an arrested type of civilization. They are two or three hundred years behind the age. They have retained the methods—perhaps not of Claude Duval, as their enemies allege, but of Sir Robert Walpole, as their friends could not deny. Here in America to-day they are anachronisms. They stand athwart our advance. I have no wish to call them names or to think them worse than they are; but I know that association with them is not good for you or for me. It is our duty—your duty and mine, and the duty of all who have a little enlightenment—to arouse the public against these survivals of a lower stage, and to fight them incessantly, and now and then to beat them, so that they may be made to respect our views. You say they are giving the city as good a government as our mixed population will stand. Well, that may be true; I don’t think it is quite true; but even if it is, what of it? Are we to be satisfied with that? The best way to educate our mixed population to stand a better government is to fight these fellows steadily. Nothing educates them more than an election, followed by an object lesson.”
“That’s all very well,” responded Van Dyne, when the Judge had made an end of his long speech. “But I don’t believe the organization leaders are really so far behind other people, or so much worse. They’re not hypocrites, that’s all. They know what they want, and they take it the easiest way they can.”
“If that is the best defense you can make for them, they are worse than I thought,” retorted the Judge. “Sometimes the easiest way to take what you want is to steal it.”
“I don’t claim that they are perfect, all of them,” the younger man declared. “I suppose they are all sorts—good, bad, and indifferent. But we are all miserable sinners, you know—at least we say so every Sunday. And I have known bad men in the church.”
“Come, come, Curtis,” the Judge replied, “that’s unworthy of you, isn’t it? You would not be apologizing to me for joining the church, would you?”
Van Dyne was about to answer hastily, but he checked the words on his lips. He looked away and across the frozen park to the pushing crowd on Broadway; but he did not really see the huge wagons rumbling in and out of Mail Street, nor did he hear the insistent clang of the cable-car.