I had some money I felt that my need for more money
was to be treated as a secondary need, and that while it was my business
to make more money where I legitimately and properly could, yet that it
was also my business to treat other kinds of work as more important than
money-making.

Almost immediately after leaving Harvard in 1880 I began to take an
interest in politics. I did not then believe, and I do not now believe,
that any man should ever attempt to make politics his only career. It
is a dreadful misfortune for a man to grow to feel that his whole
livelihood and whole happiness depend upon his staying in office. Such
a feeling prevents him from being of real service to the people while
in office, and always puts him under the heaviest strain of pressure to
barter his convictions for the sake of holding office. A man should have
some other occupation--I had several other occupations--to which he can
resort if at any time he is thrown out of office, or if at any time he
finds it necessary to choose a course which will probably result in
his being thrown out, unless he is willing to stay in at cost to his
conscience.

At that day, in 1880, a young man of my bringing up and convictions
could join only the Republican party, and join it I accordingly did.
It was no simple thing to join it then. That was long before the era of
ballot reform and the control of primaries; long before the era when we
realized that the Government must take official notice of the deeds and
acts of party organizations. The party was still treated as a private
corporation, and in each district the organization formed a kind of
social and political club. A man had to be regularly proposed for and
elected into this club, just as into any other club. As a friend of mine
picturesquely phrased it, I "had to break into the organization with a
jimmy."

Under these circumstances there was some difficulty in joining the local
organization, and considerable amusement and excitement to be obtained
out of it after I had joined.

It was over thirty-three years ago that I thus became a member of the
Twenty-first District Republican Association in the city of New York.
The men I knew best were the men in the clubs of social pretension
and the men of cultivated taste and easy life. When I began to make
inquiries as to the whereabouts of the local Republican Association and
the means of joining it, these men--and the big business men and lawyers
also--lau