To return to our country town. It is easy to see that the railroad is pouring out its money in the systematic corruption of the entire community. Even the offices with which it has no contact will be affected by this corruption. Men put in office because they are tools will work as tools only. Voters once bribed will thereafter vote for money only. The subscribing and the voting classes, whose state of mind is outlined above, are not purely mercenary. The retired grocer, the florist, the druggist, are all influenced by mixed motives, in which personal interest bears a greater or a smaller share. Each of these men belongs to a party, as a Brahmin is born into a caste. His spirit must suffer an agony of conversion before he can get free, even if he is poor. If he has property, he must pay for that conversion by the loss of money, also. Since 1865 the towns throughout the United States have been passing through this stage. A ring was likely to spring up wherever there was available capital. We hear a great talk about the failure of our institutions as applied to cities, as if it were our incapacity to deal with masses of people and with the problems of city expansion that wrecked us. It is nothing of the sort. There is intellect and business capacity enough in the country to run the Chinese Empire like clockwork. Philosophers state broadly that our people “prefer to live in towns,” and cite the rush to the cities during the last thirty years. The truth is that the exploitation of the continent could be done most conveniently by the assembling of business men in towns; and hence it is that the worst rings are found in the larger cities. But there are rings everywhere; and wherever you see one you will find a factory behind it. If the population had remained scattered, commerce would have pursued substantially the same course. We should have had the rings just the same. It is perfectly true that the wonderful and scientific concentration of business that we have seen in the past thirty years gave the chance for the wonderful and scientific concentration of its control over politics. The state machine could be constructed easily, by consolidating local rings of the same party name. * * * * *