The American plan of party government provides for primaries, caucuses, and town, county, and State conventions. It was devised on political principles, and was intended to be a means of working out the will of the majority, by a gradual delegation of power from bottom to top. The exigencies of commerce required that this machinery should be made to work backwards,--namely, from top to bottom. It was absolutely necessary for commerce to have a political dictator; and this was found to be perfectly easy. Every form and process of nomination is gravely gone through with, the dictator merely standing by and designating the officers and committee-men at every step. There is something positively Egyptian in the formalism that has been kept up in practice, and in the state of mind of men who are satisfied with the procedure. The men who, in the course of a party convention, are doing this marching and countermarching, this forming and dissolving into committees and delegations, and who appear like acolytes going through mystical rites and ceremonies, are only self-seeking men, without a real political idea in their heads. Their evolutions are done to be seen by the masses of the people, who will give them party support if these forms are complied with. We all know well another interesting perversion of function. A legislator is by political theory a wise, enlightened man, pledged to intellectual duties. He gives no bonds. He is responsible only under the Constitution and to his own conscience. Therefore, if the place is to be filled by a dummy, almost anybody will do. A town clerk must be a competent man, even under boss rule; but a legislator will serve the need so long as he is able to say “ay” and “no.” The boss, then, governs the largest and the most complex business enterprise in the State; and he is always a man of capacity. He is obliged to conduct it in a cumbersome and antiquated manner, and to proceed at every step according to precedent and by a series of fictions. When we consider that the legislators and governors are, after all, not absolute dummies; that among them are ambitious and rapacious men, with here and there an enemy or a traitor to the boss and to his patrons, we see that the boss must be well equipped with the intellect of intrigue. And remember this: he must keep both himself and his patrons out of jail, and so far as possible keep them clear of public reprobation. We have not as yet had any national boss, because the necessity for owning Congress has not as yet become continuous; and the interests which have bought the national legislature at one time or another have done it by bribing individuals, in the old-fashioned way.