adrone, as representative of
the railroads, and says with a laugh, "Don't they all do it?"

The boss believes in himself. It is one of his strong points. And he has
experience to back him. In the fall of 1894 we shook off boss rule in
New York, and set up housekeeping for ourselves. We kept it up three
years, and then went back to the old style. I should judge that we did
it because we were tired of too much virtue. Perhaps we were not built
to hold such a lot at once. Besides, it is much easier to be ruled than
to rule. That fall, after the election, when I was concerned about what
would become of my small parks, of the Health Department in which I took
such just pride, and of a dozen other things, I received one unvarying
reply to my anxious question, or rather two. If it was the Health
Department, I was told: "Go to Platt. He is the only man who can do it.
He is a sensible man, and will see that it is protected." If small
parks, it was: "Go to Croker. He will not allow the work to be stopped."
A playgrounds bill was to be presented in the legislature, and everybody
advised: "Go to Platt. He won't object, it is popular." And so on. My
advisers were not politicians. They were business men, but recently
honestly interested in reform. I was talking one day, with a gentleman
of very wide reputation as a philanthropist, about the unhappy lot of
the old fire-engine horses,--which, after lives of toil that deserve a
better fate, are sold for a song to drag out a weary existence hauling
some huckster's cart around,--and wishing that they might be pensioned
off to live out their years on a farm, with enough to eat and a chance
to roll in the grass. He was much interested, and promptly gave me this
advice: "I tell you what you do. You go and see Croker. He likes
horses." No wonder the boss believes in himself. He would be less than
human if he did not. And he is very human.

I had voted on the day of the Greater New York election,--the Tammany
election, as we learned to call it afterward,--in my home out in the
Borough of Queens, and went over to the depot to catch the train for the
city. On the platform were half a dozen of my neighbors, all business
men, all "friends of reform." Some of them were just down from
breakfast. One I remember as introducing a resolution, in a meeting we
had held, about the discourtesy of local politicians. He looked
surprised when reminded that it was election day. "Why, is it to-day?"
he said. "T