For over nine years--ever since the death of Big Kennedy--I had kept the town in my hands, and nothing strong enough to shake my hold upon it. This must have its end. It was not in the chapter of chance that anyone's rule should be uninterrupted. Men turn themselves in bed, if for no reason than just to lie the other way; and so will your town turn on its couch of politics. Folk grow weary of a course or a conviction, and to rest themselves, they will put it aside and have another in its place. Then, after a bit, they return to the old. In politics, these shifts, which are really made because the community would relax from some pose of policy and stretch itself in new directions, are ever given a pretense of morality as their excuse. There is a hysteria to arise from the crush and jostle of the great city. Men, in their crowded nervousness, will clamor for the new. This is also given the name of morals. And because I was aware how these conditions of restlessness and communal hysteria ever subsist, and like a magazine of powder ask but the match to fire them and explode into fragments whatever rule might at the time exist, I went sure that some day, somehow the machine would be overthrown. Also, I went equally certain how defeat would be only temporary, and that before all was done, the town would again come back to the machine. You've seen a squall rumple and wrinkle and toss the bosom of a lake? If you had investigated, you would have learned how that storm-disturbance was wholly of the surface. It did not bite the depths below. When the gust had passed, the lake--whether for good or bad--re-settled to its usual, equal state. Now the natural conditions of New York are machine conditions. Wherefore, I realized, as I've written, that no gust of reformation could either trouble it deeply or last for long, and that the moment it had passed, the machine must at once succeed to the situation. However, when the Reverend Bronson left me, vowing insurrection, I had no fears of the sort immediate. The times were not hysterical, nor ripe for change. I would re-carry the city; the Reverend Bronson--if his strength were to last that long--with those moralists he enlisted, might defeat me on some other distant day. But for the election at hand I was safe by every sign.