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 activi