Biennial sessions of the Legislature are already a favorite device for minimizing the evils of Legislatures. But the dictator would have desired to discourage popular assemblies. The whole business world would have backed the boss, in his plan for quinquennial or decennial sessions. Once give way to the laziness, once cater to the inertia and selfishness of the citizen, and he sinks into slumber. Our feeble and floundering citizens’ movements in New York during the last ten years show us how hard it is to recover the power of self-government when once lost; how gradual the gain, even under the most stimulating conditions of misrule. Given thirty years of able administration by a single man, and the boss system would have sunk so deep into the popular mind, the arctic crust of prejudice and incompetence would have frozen so deep, that it might easily take two hundred years for the community to come to life. Recovery could only come through the creeping in of abuses, through the decentralization of the great tyranny. And as each abuse arose, the population would clamor to the dictator and beg him to correct it. After a while a few thinkers would arise who would see that the only way to revive our institutions was by the painstaking education of the people. The stock in trade of these teachers would be the practical abuses, and very often they would be obliged to urge upon the people a course which would make the abuses temporarily more acute. We have escaped an age of tyrants, because the eyes of the bosses and their masters were fixed on money. They were not ambitious. Government was an annex to trade. To certain people the boss appears as a ruler of men. If proof were needed that he is a hired man employed to do the dirty work of others, what better proof could we have than this: No one of all the hundreds of bosses thrown up during the last thirty years has ever lifted himself out of his sphere, or even essayed to rule. That devotion of the individual to his bank account which created the boss and saved us from the dictator must now be traced back into business. * * * * *