R. Gratz Brown of Missouri, President; John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, Vice-President; Governor Hoffman of New York, Secretary of State; Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, Secretary of the Treasury; General Hancock of Pennsylvania, Secretary of War; Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana, Secretary of the Interior; Horace Greeley of New York, Postmaster-General; George H. Pendleton of Ohio, Attorney-General. As it happened, Greeley became a presidential and Gratz Brown a vice-presidential candidate; Hancock subsequently ran for president, and Hendricks achieved the vice-presidency; but the serious and uncontradicted publication of that slate indicated the direction of Tweed’s ambitions at the time when Samuel J. Tilden wrought his downfall and relegated Hoffman into obscurity. In the reaction from these disclosures, Tilden became the younger generation’s hero: he had rescued New York from corruption. I was so impressed with his services that, when my fellow law-student, Michael Sigerson, ran for the State Assembly, while Tilden sought the presidency, I made my first entry into politics--before I was even a voter--by giving several October nights, in 1876, to speech-making for Tilden and Sigerson in the latter’s district on the Lower East Side. I am one of those who have always felt that Tilden was elected, and that the National Republican machine prevented him from taking his seat. My observation of the machine system convinced me, through such happenings, that the gravest danger to democracy arose from within. I soon saw that, in such a city as New York, where the mass of the voters are unfamiliar with governmental functions and ignorant that a proper administration thereof is the safeguard of liberty, the control of the dominant party would frequently be secured by a character like Tweed. The more I saw of Tammany Hall, the deeper this conviction became. Tammany was then as well organized as at any time in its history. The district leaders were generally selected by its boss and always responsible to him. They, in turn, had their precinct leaders dependent on them for preferment and continuance in office. The boss arranged his appointments so that he could absolutely depend on the servility of a majority of the district leaders. It was only now and then that one had the courage to assert his independence and fight the machine. Then he would either be summarily displaced, lose his own little organization by his inability to dispense patronage, or else he would be brought back into slavery by the gift of office. This plan of organization has, with slight alterations, continued ever since. After Tweed’s displacement, John Kelly came into the leadership; his personal honesty was never doubted, but he had used the old system to obtain power and had to continue it to hold what he had gained. The story of his downfall, though not discreditable to him, is almost as dramatic as Tweed’s.