"Well, I reckon you can take care of it," said Hastings calmly.
"Oh, yes, we kin take care of it, all right. Only, I don't want to do nothing without consulting you."
In these two statements Mr. Kelly summed up the whole of politics in Remsen City, in any city anywhere, in the country at large.
Kelly had started life as a blacksmith. But he soon tired of the dullness and toil and started forth to find some path up to where men live by making others work for them instead of plodding along at the hand-to-mouth existence that is the lot of those who live by their own labors alone. He was a safe blower for a while, but wisely soon abandoned that fascinating but precarious and unremunerative career. From card sharp following the circus and sheet-writer to a bookmaker he graduated into bartender, into proprietor of a doggery. As every saloon is a political club, every saloon-keeper is of necessity a politician. Kelly's woodbox happened to be a convenient place for directing the floaters and the repeaters. Kelly's political importance grew apace. His respectability grew more slowly. But it had grown and was growing.
If you had asked Lizzie, the maid, why she was a Democrat, she would have given no such foolish reason as the average man gives.
She would not have twaddled about principles—when everyone with eyeteeth cut ought to know that principles have departed from politics, now that both parties have been harmonized and organized into agencies of the plutocracy. She would not have said she was a Democrat because her father was, or because all her friends and associates were. She would have replied—in pleasantly Americanized Irish:
"I'm a Democrat because when my father got too old to work, Mr. House, the Democrat leader, gave him a job on the elevator at the Court House—though that dirty thief and scoundrel, Kelly, the Republican boss, owned all the judges and county officers. And when my brother lost his place as porter because he took a drink too many, Mr. House gave him a card to the foreman of the gas company, and he went to work at eight a week and is there yet."
Mr. Kelly and Mr. House belong to a maligned and much misunderstood class. Whenever you find anywhere in nature an activity of any kind, however pestiferous its activity may seem to you—or however good—you may be sure that if you look deep enough you will find that that activity has a use, arises from a need. The "robber trusts" and the political bosses are interesting examples of this basic truth. They have arisen because science, revolutionizing human society, has compelled it to organize. The organization is crude and clumsy and stupid, as yet, because men are ignorant, are experimenting, are working in the dark. So, the organizing forces are necessarily crude and clumsy and stupid.
Mr. Hastings was—all unconsciously—organizing society industrially. Mr. Kelly—equally unconscious of the true nature of his activities—was organizing society politically. And as industry and politics are—and ever have been—at bottom two names for identically the same thing, Mr. Hastings and Mr. Kelly were bound sooner or later to get together.
Remsen City was organized like every other large or largish community. There were two clubs—the Lincoln and the Jefferson—which well enough represented the "respectable elements"—that is, those citizens who were of the upper class. There were two other clubs—the Blaine and the Tilden—which were similarly representative of the "rank and file" and, rather, of the petty officers who managed the rank and file and voted it and told it what to think and what not to think, in exchange taking care of the needy sick, of the aged, of those out of work and so on. Martin Hastings—the leading Republican citizen of Remsen City, though for obvious reasons his political activities were wholly secret and stealthy—was the leading spirit in the Lincoln Club. Jared Olds—Remsen City's richest and most influential Democrat, the head of the gas company and the water company—was foremost in the Jefferson Club. At the Lincoln and the Jefferson you rarely saw any but "gentlemen"—men of established position and fortune, deacons and vestrymen, judges, corporation lawyers and the like. The Blaine and the Tilden housed a livelier and a far less select class—the "boys"—the active politicians, the big saloon keepers, the criminal lawyers, the gamblers, the chaps who knew how to round up floaters and to handle gangs of repeaters, the active young sports working for political position, by pitching and carrying for the political leaders, by doing their errands of charity or crookedness or what not. Joe House was the "big shout" at the Tilden; Dick Kelly could be found every evening on the third—or "wine," or plotting—floor of the Blaine—found holding court. And very respectful indeed were even the most eminent of Lincoln, or Jefferson, respectabilities who sought him out there to ask favors of him.