“The bridge men are not depending upon a lobby at Des Moines, or any state capitol, to put through what they want, or to prevent legislation that will make bridge letting competitive. They work to elect or defeat supervisors. They finance state supervisors’ annual meetings and give the watchdogs of the public treasury that contains your tax money such a good time that the ‘boys’ fall under lasting obligations to the bridge companies. “Bribe the lawmakers? Oh, no! You can’t say that. It isn’t a bribe to hand a man a line of soft talk, is it? It isn’t a bribe to give a county official a hilarious good time at a summer resort, is it? Or to pay his hotel bills when he attends the state meetings? No--a thousand times no--legally. “But the bridge men get there just the same. They have for years prevented any legislation that would give them a dollar’s worth of bridge work for a dollar’s worth of taxes.” So well satisfied were the favored bridge builders with the _status quo_ in Nebraska in 1913 that they are said to have maintained at the state legislature a powerful lobby to oppose by corrupt methods a bill whose one purpose was to require bidders to furnish estimates on uniform blanks. The information thus obtained would have been placed on file at the state capitol and made available to all who might wish to compare the cost of construction in different counties--light would have been let into the operations of the counties in bridge-building matters. It would seem, then, that the _system_ did have much to do with waste of public funds and inefficiency of every sort and was the basis of a certain amount of corruption, in all the states mentioned. It was not all simply a matter of “good” men and “bad” men. But the breakdown of the county in highway affairs is fast becoming ancient history, not directly, through a process of regeneration, but through forces playing upon the county from without which we will again identify for the present simply as the “good-roads” movement, of which more hereafter. [12] From an unpublished report of the Rochester Bureau of Municipal Research, 1915. [13] _Successful Farming_, June, 1913. CHAPTER XI NULLIFICATION Every now and then we shall have to remind ourselves that the county made the politician, rather than the other way round. And the county in its turn, is pretty well rooted in the good graces of human nature. When American counties had been formed and their legal status as subordinates of the state had been established, the people throughout the length and breadth of each of the states were pretty much of one mind in the fundamental standards of personal conduct. A tradition of strict morality dominated New England. Its dominion was not seriously questioned. The South and the middle states may not have been so strict but they were homogeneous in their own brand of morality.