ublican party choose
a manager and pay him $10,000 a year and have a lien on all his time and
energy. The plan was widely discussed and its severest critics were the
politicians who would suffer from it. The wide-spread comment with which
it was received revealed the change that has come over the popular idea
of a political party since the State began forty years ago to bring the
party under its control.

But flexibility is absolutely essential to a party system that
adequately serves a growing democracy. And under a two-party system, as
ours is probably bound to remain, the independent voter usually holds
the balance of power. He may be merely a disgruntled voter seeking for
revenge, or an overpleased voter seeking to maintain a profitable
status quo, or he may belong to that class of super-citizens from which
mugwumps arise. In any case, the majorities at elections are usually
determined by him. And party orthodoxy made by the State is almost as
distasteful to him as the rigor of the boss. He relishes neither the one
nor the other.

In the larger cities the citizens' tickets and fusion movements
are types of independent activities. In some cities they are merely
temporary associations, formed for a single, thorough housecleaning. The
Philadelphia Committee of One Hundred, which was organized in 1880
to fight the Gas Ring, is an example. It issued a Declaration of
Principles, demanding the promotion of public service rather than
private greed, and the prosecution of "those who have been guilty of
election frauds, maladministration of office, or misappropriation of
public funds." Announcing that it would endorse only candidates
who signed this declaration, the committee supported the Democratic
candidates, and nominated for Receiver of Taxes a candidate of its
own, who became also the Democratic nominee when the regular Democratic
candidate withdrew. Philadelphia was overwhelmingly Republican. But the
committee's aid was powerful enough to elect the Democratic candidate
for mayor by 6000 majority and the independent candidate for Receiver
of Taxes by 20,000. This gave the Committee access to the records of
the doings of the Gas Ring. In 1884, however, the candidate which it
endorsed was defeated, and it disbanded.

Similar in experience was the famous New York Committee of Seventy,
organized in 1894 after Dr. Parkhurst's lurid disclosures of police
connivance with every degrading vice. A call was issued by thirty-thr