“You were going to say some wise thing about the people’s inviolate rights, eh? We’ve all got ‘inviolate rights.’ But if we leave ’em laying around loose and don’t stand up for ’em, we can’t expect much pity when someone else cops ’em away from us. If I try to turn you out of your house, you’ve got a right to prevent me. And you would. If you sat by and let me do it, you’d deserve what you got. If I try to turn the people out of their rights in the Legislature and they stand for it, who’s got a kick coming? Once in a blue moon some man whose brains have all run to lungs—nothing personal—gets up and shouts to the people that they’re being conned. Sometimes—not _this_ time, mind you—they believe it, and they throw over the Machine and elect a bunch of wall-eyed reformers that know as much about practical politics as a corn-fed dodo bird knows about theology. What happens? The city and the State are run in a way that’d make a schoolboy cry. At the end of one single administration there’s a record of incompetence and messed-up official affairs that takes a century to straighten out. The police have been made so pure they won’t let ice and milk be sold for sick babies on Sundays, but they haven’t time to keep folks from being sandbagged in open daylight. The Building Department Commissioners are so incorruptible they don’t know a brick from a lump of putty. And the contractors eat up chunks of overpay for rotten work. And so in every branch of government. The people get wise to all this, and they decide it’s better to be bled by professionals and to get at least part of their money’s worth in decent service than it is to be bled just as heavy by a pack of measly amachoors and get no service at all. So back they come to the Boss, begging him to get on the job again. Which he does, being a self-sacrificing sort of a cuss, and glad to help the ‘plain pe-ople.’ Likewise himself.” “The administration you describe is the result of fanaticism, not real reform. It——”