The Italians as a whole, in Chicago as in many other places, have been more united in their action than most other racial groups, and under their ancient habits of padrone leadership have shown a tendency to accept boss rule, though the Italian voter as an individual is no more amenable to corrupt influences than voters of any other race. Over the whole history of the League’s activity it has been true that the races most responsive to its appeal are the Scandinavian, German, Irish, and Bohemian. Given a candidate of any race, other things being equal, the voters of that race will support him; as between two competing outsiders, the voters of these races have been more than willing to heed disinterested appeals from the point of view of good government. Some of the best aldermen during the past twenty years in Chicago have been Germans. The late Alderman Beilfuss, Republican, a native of Germany and an excellent official, was re-elected time after time in the Fifteenth Ward; but as the Scandinavians and Germans--especially Lutheran Germans--moved away and the scale of prosperity in the ward’s population deteriorated, his pluralities diminished, and in the year before his death he won by a narrow margin. In the predominantly Bohemian Twelfth Ward aldermanic candidates recommended by the League were elected almost without exception for many years, regardless of political alignment. In that ward, from 1904 to 1909, inclusive, the Republican Bohemian and the Democratic German candidates, both indorsed by the League, alternated in winning elections, the pluralities running from 3,400 on one side to 3,100 on the other--in a ward casting a total of perhaps 15,000 votes a shift of 6,500. When Mayor Thompson, Republican, in 1915, carried the ward by nearly 4,000, Alderman Kerner, a Bohemian Democrat of excellent record, carried it in the same election by 3,350. In other words, there was a politically independent swing of nearly one-half of the 15,000 votes cast in the election. The Irish voters generally pay close attention to what the League says. In the spring campaign of 1919, the League’s condemnation of a Democratic Irish alderman in the Thirtieth Ward furnished his opponent, whom the League recommended, with enough ammunition to defeat him for renomination, whereupon an Irish Republican, a former alderman with a good record, who received the final indorsement of the League, turned in and beat the Democratic nominee. In the Thirteenth Ward, largely Irish, which Mayor Thompson, Republican, lost in 1919 by more than 4,000, a Democratic alderman condemned by the League was defeated by a native-born Republican whom the League indorsed, by more than 1,800 votes. SOME OTHER INSTANCES Dr. Charles W. Eliot told the Good Government Conference at Cincinnati in 1909 of an incident in Massachusetts which reflected the interest of foreign-born voters in political questions on their merits regardless of racial or religious considerations: