If I have elaborated my observations at some length, it is to show why I am a foe to machine politics. This evil, which can reach as high as Washington, has its roots in the city election precinct. The district leader holds his power either through dispensing minor patronage or by influence with magistrates and political clubs, and, to do this, he must retain the favour of the city boss. This gives the latter a thoroughly organized army that includes even a quasi spy system, and at the same time confers a power unshakeable by anything short of an overt criminal act. Personal criticism of the boss, ostracizing him from the better sort of society, does not help matters, does not harm him. He is content with holding what he has won; the thing to be attacked is not the individual; it is the system, and, in combating that, the serious and practically unchangeable difficulty consists in the fact that very few, if any, self-respecting, high-class men will submit to being bossed. They will not take orders from Crokers or Penroses, Hannas or Murphys; therefore, they enter fields where the final arbiters, the men who have to decide upon their worth and promotion, are of a different calibre, and where the reward for their efforts and work is not dependent upon the whims and fancies of a political boss. CHAPTER VIII MY ENTRANCE INTO NATIONAL POLITICS “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.” Not mine--mine made me a politician. At fifty-five years of age, financially independent, and rich in experience, and recently released from the toils of materialism, it ceaselessly confronted me with my duty to pay back, in the form of public service, the overdraft which I had been permitted to make upon the opportunities of this country. Repayment in money alone would not suffice: I must pay in the form of personal service, for which my experience had equipped me. And I must pay now, or never. It was a great surprise to my friends when, in 1912, I suddenly entered politics, and threw myself heart and soul in the enterprise of securing the Presidential nomination for Woodrow Wilson. “Why,” they asked me, “should a man like yourself, whose whole active life has been spent in the thick of the battle for wealth, embark on the untried sea of politics? And why, if you are determined to take the risks of this experiment, do you choose so forlorn a hope, as the cause of the least likely of all the candidates, for the nomination of the party that has elected only one President since the Civil War?”