What we want to do, what we are doing, is to get rid of gross malpractices, gross theft, gross abuse of public trust. It is waste of time to expend learned argument on a judge who has been bought. The litigants must join forces and get rid of that judge before they can talk. Of course we know that the real trouble with our politics is that these attorneys have themselves bribed the judge and share in the division of their clients’ property. It is to questions of this kind that the conscience of the country has been drawn. There is nothing peculiarly sacred about politics, but the history of reform movements during the last few years furnishes such striking and wonderful illustrations of human nature that it is worth study. A few men have a desire, a hope of improving some evil. They stagger towards it and fall. The impulse is always good. The mistakes made are progressive. They record the past; they outline the future. If you draw an arrow through them, it will point north. If you arrange the reform movements against Tammany Hall in a series, and consider them minutely, you will find that the earlier ones are comparatively corrupt, sporadic, disorganized, ignorant, and shortsighted in purpose. They have steadily become more honest, more frequent, more coherent, more intelligent and ambitious. If you examine any one of them, it would be impossible to misplace it in the series. Looking more closely, you see the reason. The earlier the movement, the more zealously do its leaders imitate the methods of current politics. Each movement represents the philosophy of its era. We have had: 1. The frankly corrupt era (fighting the devil with fire). 2. The compromise era (buying reform). 3. The educational era, which began two years ago, after Low was defeated, when people said they were glad of the movement, in spite of the defeat. Note this, that Low did not lead a lost cause, nor was any belief in lost causes at the bottom of his movement. But in making the best of his defeat, many minds stumbled into philosophy. And this illustrates the progress of an idea. People will accept it as an explanation of the past before they will take it as a guide to the future. It glimmers before them at a moment when they need comfort, and vanishes in the light of a comfortable habit or prejudice. This apparition of the educational idea flitted across New York and took root in many minds.