The reader may wonder what the decent people of New York were thinking, saying and doing all these years while these operations of the managers of the controllable vote were in progress. Just exactly what they are now thinking, saying and doing all over the country;--complaining and deploring that it can not be helped. Sometimes on the heels of some unusually scandalous disclosure a reform movement would be started, aided perhaps by young men intensely patriotic, fresh from school and college where they had read about our fine political structure in books that fail to refer to the rotten foundation. They learned by sad experience as others before them that the stream will rise no higher than its source; that with a controllable electorate kindly provided by the manhood suffrage constitution and an organization of scallawags, loafers and criminals to control it the politicians had the best of the situation. Bryce, who was in New York in 1870 and saw the Tweed Ring in its glory, gives us a fine picture of the effect of manhood suffrage in prostrating public conscience and energy. He says that the respectable democratic leaders winked at the Ring’s misdeeds for the sake of the vote; that the press had been purchased or subsidized; that the bench was controlled; that three-quarters of the citizens “paid little or nothing in the way of direct taxes, and did not realize that the increase of civic burdens would fall upon them as well as upon the rich.” Here you have the case as plain as day; the electorate, whose business and function it was to secure good government and prevent these evils, failed in its duty; it was itself corrupt and inefficient; and why? Because three-quarters of it paid little or no direct taxes. In other words, they were not property holders. Just as the human soul is undiscoverable except as revealed by the human body, so civilization exhibits itself in property; and the rabble who are unfamiliar with property and are devoid of sympathy with its rights, feel no interest in good government or in any other incident of civilization. Bryce further says: “Moreover, the Ring had cunningly placed on the pay rolls of the city a large number of persons rendering comparatively little service, who had become a body of janizaries, bound to defend the government which paid them, working hard for it at elections, and adding, together with the regular employees, no contemptible quota to the total Tammany vote. As for the Boss, those very qualities in him which repelled men of refinement made him popular with the crowd.” (_American Commonwealth_, Vol. II, p. 391.) Notwithstanding the Tweed disclosures there was no serious attempt to apply the only practical remedy by reforming the electorate. Here and there a voice was heard crying in the wilderness, but no one regarded it. In October 1876, a writer in the _North American Review_ was clear-eyed enough to read the lesson of the Tweed Ring. He wrote: