e 1599: Democrats elected a governor by 22,520 plurality and
carried the Legislature by forty on joint ballot.--Appleton's
_Cyclopaedia_, 1877, p. 621.]

Nevertheless, the hunt for State senators, involving the election of a
United States Senator in 1879, provoked animated contests which
centred about the candidacy of John Morrissey, whom Republicans and
the combined anti-Tammany factions backed with spirit. Morrissey had
carried the Tweed district for senator in 1874, and the taunt that no
other neighbourhood would elect a notorious gambler and graduate of
the prize-ring goaded him into opposing Augustus Schell in one of the
fashionable districts of the metropolis. Schell had the advantage of
wealth, influence, long residence in the precinct, and the
enthusiastic support of Kelly, who turned the contest into a battle
for the prestige of victory. For the moment the fierceness of the
fight excited the hopes of Republicans that the State might be
carried, and to spread the influence of the warring Democratic
factions into all sections of the commonwealth, Republican journals
made a combined attack upon Allen C. Beach.

Like Sanford E. Church, Beach was a courteous, good-natured
politician, who tried to keep company with a canal ring and keep his
reputation above reproach. But his character did not refine under the
tests imposed upon it. His policy of seeming to know nothing had
resulted in doubling the cost of canal repairs during his four years
in office. A careful analysis of his record showed that only once did
he vote against the most extravagant demands of the predatory
contractors. This did not prove him guilty of corruption, "but when as
the steady servant of the canal ring," it was asked, "he voted
thousands and thousands of dollars, sometimes at the rate of a hundred
thousand a day, into the pockets of men whom he knew to be thieves,
and on claims which he must have known were full of fraud, was he not
lending himself to corruption?"[1600] This charge his opponents
circulated through many daily and scores of weekly papers, making the
weakness of his character appear more objectionable.

[Footnote 1600: New York _Tribune_, November 3, 1877.]

To these attacks Beach affected an indifference which he did not
really feel, for the pride of a candidate who desires the respect of
his neighbours is not flattered by their distrust of his integrity.
Church had felt the iron enter his soul, and had Tilden and the
refor