tributed, and that all he could
say was that any man who had subscribed to his campaign fund under the
impression that the receipt of the subscription would be a bar to the
performance of public duty was sadly mistaken.

The control by Mr. Platt and his lieutenants over the organization was
well-nigh complete. There were splits among the bosses, and insurgent
movements now and then, but the ordinary citizens had no control over
the political machinery except in a very few districts. There were,
however, plenty of good men in politics, men who either came from
districts where there was popular control, or who represented a genuine
aspiration towards good citizenship on the part of some boss or group of
bosses, or else who had been nominated frankly for reasons of expediency
by bosses whose attitude towards good citizenship was at best one of
Gallio-like indifference. At the time when I was nominated for Governor,
as later when Mr. Hughes was nominated and renominated for Governor,
there was no possibility of securing the nomination unless the bosses
permitted it. In each case the bosses, the machine leaders, took a man
for whom they did not care, because he was the only man with whom they
could win. In the case of Mr. Hughes there was of course also the fact
of pressure from the National Administration. But the bosses were never
overcome in a fair fight, when they had made up their minds to fight,
until the Saratoga Convention in 1910, when Mr. Stimson was nominated
for Governor.

Senator Platt had the same inborn capacity for the kind of politics
which he liked that many big Wall Street men have shown for not wholly
dissimilar types of finance. It was his chief interest, and he
applied himself to it unremittingly. He handled his private business
successfully; but it was politics in which he was absorbed, and he
concerned himself therewith every day in the year. He had built up an
excellent system of organization, and the necessary funds came from
corporations and men of wealth who contributed as I have described
above. The majority of the men with a natural capacity for organization
leadership of the type which has generally been prevalent in New York
politics turned to Senator Platt as their natural chief and helped build
up the organization, until under his leadership it became more powerful
and in a position of greater control than any other Republican machine
in the country, excepting in Pennsylvania. The Democrati