The capitalist whose doubtful bill he had shoved through the Assembly; the coal-heaver whose wife’s funeral expenses he had paid; the Italian peddler whose family he had saved from eviction; the countless poor whom his secretly-donated coal, clothes and food had tided over hard winters; the struggling farmer whose mortgage he had paid; the bartender he had saved from a murderer’s fate: all these beneficiaries and more were commanded, in this hour of stress, to remember the Boss’s generosity, and to pay the debt by working for his election. Checks of vast proportions (drawn ostensibly for railroad expenses) were cashed by Shevlin, Bourke and the rest, and the proceeds hurled into every crevice or vulnerable spot in the voting phalanx. The pick of the Atlantic seaboard’s orators were summoned at their own price, and commissioned to sway the people to the Machine’s cause. Conover even had wild thoughts of winning favor with his home-city’s cultured classes by beautifying Granite’s public gardens with the erecting of a heroic marble statue of Ibid (who, he declared, was his favorite poet, and had more sense than all the rest of the “Famous Quotation” authors put together). When at length he was reluctantly convinced as to “Ibid’s” real meaning, the Railroader ordered the papers to suppress the proposed announcement and to substitute one to the effect that he intended to donate a colossal figure of Blind Justice for the summit of the City Hall. On waged the fight. Disinterested outsiders beyond the scope of the Machine’s attraction were daily drawn, by hundreds, into the Standish camp. In the country districts his strength grew steadily and rapidly. The people at large were aroused, not to the usual pitch of illogical hysteria incident on a movement of the sort, but to a calm, resolute jealousy of their own public rights. Which latter state every politician knows to be immeasurably the more dangerous of the two. Conover’s efforts, on the other hand were already bearing fruit. His tireless energy, backed by his genius and the perfection of his system, were hourly enlarging his following. The “railroad wards” and slums of Granite and of other towns were with him to a man, prepared on Election Day to hurl mighty cohorts of the Unwashed to the polls in their idol’s behalf. Loyalty, self-interest, party allegiance, and more material forms of pressure were binding throngs of others besides these underworld denizens to the Conover standard. Not even the shrewdest non-partisan dared forecast the result of the contest.