The organized power which manhood suffrage has in the past placed behind Morrissey and Tweed and tens of thousands of others continues in operation to this day. Writing in 1881, Reemelin says: “There is but one political status in history, which at all equals the conditions of things that now curse the United States. It was that of the latter part of the Middle Ages when the Condottieri were masters of society. But these soldiers of fortune had at least military capacity; their personal bearing was brave, if venal. Our politicians are many of them ruffians; true indeed, while it pays, to a cause; but they sneak in and out in ways that are disgusting to themselves and to those that employ them. They are the only well-defined class in this country; they infect all party movements, rule every legislature as lobbyists, control presidents, are familiar with judges, cabinet ministers, governors, and can and do proscribe the political culture and integrity of the land. They defeat every reform, ravish ballot boxes, count in and out whom they please. Publicly divided into two parties, they fraternize in secret. The voters are their puppets, the abuse of taxation and of public credit their means of support.” (_American Politics_, p. 149.) The New York Evening Post of November 14th of the year 1919 refers to a feature of the city election just held in San Francisco. One Schmitz of that city “after twice being elected mayor, underwent a sensational trial in 1907 on charges of corruption, and escaped the penitentiary when the State Supreme Court set aside the verdict against him on a technicality.” Nevertheless in 1915 he ran again for mayor and polled nearly one-third of the total vote; in 1917 he polled 33,000 votes for supervisor; in 1919 he again polled 34,128 votes for mayor out of a total of about 100,000. In other words, one-third of the San Francisco manhood suffrage electorate can be marshalled in support of a candidate with a notoriously smirched record. We must not allow ourselves to be lulled into indifference by surface politicians who offer delusive hopes of substantial reform by flimsy measures which deal with symptoms leaving the electorate unswept and ungarnished to continue as the breeding place of the malady. Mr. Bryce, for instance, who is very shy of criticising manhood suffrage, likes to indulge in optimistic imaginings. He says: “If the path to Congress and the State legislatures and the higher municipal offices were cleared of the stumbling-blocks and dirt heaps which now encumber it, cunningly placed there by the professional politicians, a great change would soon pass upon the composition of legislative bodies, and a new spirit be felt in the management of State and municipal as well as of national affairs.” (_American Commonwealth_, Vol. II, p. 75.)