“Some one spoke about being tired of wearing my collar,” he said. “Is there a man here who put on that collar against his will, or a man who didn’t beg for it? Is there a man who hasn’t profited by it? A man who hasn’t risen as I have risen and benefited when I benefited? Don’t stand there, mumchance, like a lot of dago section-hands! You were ready enough to speak before I came in. Why aren’t you, now? Is it because you’re so sorry for this poor, broken old man, who talks too much and ain’t fit to run the Machine any longer, eh? Spit it out, Staatz! If you’re qualifying for my shoes you got to learn to look less like a whipped puppy when you’re spoke to. Stand up and state your grievance like a man, you Dutch crook that I lifted out of jail! You, too, Bourke! Where’s your tongue? And all the rest of you that was on the point of choosing a new Leader.” No one answered. The Boss’s instinct power rather than his mere words held them sulky and dumb. Over each was creeping the old subservience to the peerless will that had so long shaped the Mountain State’s destinies and theirs. “I talk too much, eh?” mocked Conover. “Well, to prove that’s so, I’m going to give you curs a little Sunday-school talk right now. You say I cut out the old methods, this campaign. I did. And why did I do it? Because if these reformers had thought they were licked unfair there’s so many of ’em they’d ’a’ carried the case to every court in the land, and ’a’ drawed the whole country’s op’ra-glasses onto this p’ticular Machine, and started another such wave as swamped Dick Croker and Tammany in ’94. And then where’d the Machine and you fellers have been? There’s got to be reform in a State just so often, just like there’s got to be croup in a nursery. Every other State’s had it. And each time they’ve fished up something queer about their local Machine, and that same Machine’s never been so strong again. Well, the Mountain State’s turn for reform was overdue. It had to come. And this was the time. I thought maybe I could beat ’em on their own ground. If I had, that’d ’a’ ended reform here, forever and amen. Even if I was beat I knew the people would get so sick of one term of reform, they’d come screeching to us to take ’em back. And then’s the time my kid-glove stunts of this campaign would shine out fine against a rotten reform administration. The Machine would escape any investigation of the kind that follers a crooked campaign, and we’d simply be begged to take everything in sight for the rest of our lives. Maybe you think a chance of one term out of office was too much to pay for such a future cinch?” The speech—reasons and all—was improvised as he spoke. And again it was the Boss’s manner and his brutal magnetism rather than his words that carried conviction.