e meetings were only slightly better
attended than during the last campaign; no indication there of the
League "landslide."

Yet Kelly could not, dared not, doubt that poll. It was his only safe
guide. And it assured him that the long-dreaded disaster was at hand.
In vain was the clever trick of nominating a popular, "clean" young
reformer and opposing him with an unpopular regular of the most
offensive type--more offensive even than a professional politician of
unsavory record. At last victory was to reward the tactics of Victor
Dorn, the slow, patient building which for several years now had been
rasping the nerves of Boss Kelly.

What should he do?

It was clear to him that the doom of the old system was settled. The
plutocrats, the upper-class crowd--the "silk stockings," as they had
been called from the days when men wore knee-breeches--they fancied
that this nation-wide movement was sporadic, would work out in a few
years, and that the people would return to their allegiance. Kelly had
no such delusions. Issuing from the depths of the people, he
understood. They were learning a little something at last. They were
discovering that the ever higher prices for everything and stationary
or falling wages and salaries had some intimate relation with politics;
that at the national capitol, at the state capitol, in the county
courthouse, in the city hall their share of the nation's vast annual
production of wealth was being determined--and that the persons doing
the dividing, though elected by them, were in the employ of the
plutocracy. Kelly, seeing and comprehending, felt that it behooved him
to get for his masters--and for himself--all that could be got in the
brief remaining time. Not that he was thinking of giving up the game;
nothing so foolish as that. It would be many a year before the
plutocracy could be routed out, before the people would have the
intelligence and the persistence to claim and to hold their own. In
the meantime, they could be fooled and robbed by a hundred tricks. He
was not a constitutional lawyer, but he had practical good sense, and
could enjoy the joke upon the people in their entanglement in the toils
of their own making. Through fear of governmental tyranny they had
divided authority among legislators, executives and judges, national,
state, local. And, behold, outside of the government, out where they
had never dreamed of looking, had grown up a tyranny that was
perpetuatin