If a word from the boss will get one man employment, a word will also, very often, procure another employee’s dismissal. At a hint from him, the small shopkeeper, the peddler, the pawnbroker, the hackman, can be worried daily by the police or by the health and sanitary officials of the city on baseless or imaginary pretexts--tactics in which, as the history of almost every larger city shows, the machinery is unrelenting and vindictive. The affirmative side of the district leader’s activity is the one that makes most impression upon the neighborhood. Almost every sort of reformer, who would bring to the foreign-speaking district a sense of the need for voting for a different sort of alderman, for example, lives in another part of town, represents another stratum of society, comes into no sort of natural touch with his foreign-born fellow citizen. But the latter knows the district leader--last winter he got a job, a little coal, a bed in a hospital for his wife; his boy was let off by the police after a piece of reckless mischief; or there was some other human favor; and all the return he is asked to make--cheap enough, to be sure--is that on election day he shall vote as the district leader who helped him in his need asks him to vote. What difference does it make to him? Show him a difference, convince him that something real, something that he can understand, is involved, and he will respond. But nobody shows him. “Uptown,” whence comes the reformer whom he does not know, and whose motives he has no substantial reason to respect, does not understand his life or its problems; does not even live in the ward. The district leader does. He is his neighbor, and he sees him almost every day. Then, too, the political organization meets him on the social side, provides a club, which in the intervals between elections gives entertainments, has pool tables, provides cigars; used to provide liquor. A spirit of fellowship grows up; the new foreign-born voter gains acquaintance at the natural point of contact between his daily life and the politics into which he is being introduced. The result is obvious. POLITICAL ASPECTS OF SOCIAL CLUBS The spontaneous groups of foreign-speaking people of nearly every race, which have sprung up everywhere in response to the varied needs of the strangers within our gates--social, insurance, musical, athletic, etc.--necessarily and naturally take on political aspects. As President Wilson said once, “politics is human nature”; there is nothing sinister about this fact. It is wholesome that groups of folk, coming together spontaneously about a nucleus of common interest, should consider together and act together, in regard to such public matters as they think concern them. The only thing that is really dangerous in a republic is stolid indifference; it is on _that_ that corruption and injustice feed.