His was an hereditary office, but, unlike most men that inherit power, he had inherited also the abilities that had gained the power. His father, who had begun life as a policeman, had been a great exemplar of the political uses of an element fully realized only by the expert politician: the human element. The name of O'Malley had now for a generation been, south of Fourteenth Street, a magic title. To a legion of men, women, and children, it stood for a sort of substitute, and very near and practical, Providence. It implied contact, fellow-feeling, the personal relation. Acting upon the politician's axiom that whatever is acquired is right, the elder O'Malley had risen from the street force until, after zealous party-work, he had been promoted, in the palmy days of policy and the pool-rooms, to the "Gambling Squad," where he had performed the astounding financial feat of saving eight times his monthly salary, had retired, and grown annually richer and stronger through politics, without once losing the esteem of his voting underlings, or once seeming to cease being one of them. Since his father's death, now that gambling had declined and prostitution had risen as political material, Michael, who had been brought up to the business, had filled the place of that genuinely mourned parent. Without any publicly acknowledged means of support, even with no headquarters save the daily shifted back-rooms of saloons, he had extended and increased the power and the fortune that had been left to him. He was known as the friend of the distressed; he was recognized as benefiting with his left hand the poor whom he unimpededly robbed with his right. To those who were without money or without assistance he was always accessible. He made festival with the merry and was readily sympathetic with them that mourned. By small gifts at all times and large gifts in days of emergency, by acting as the adviser, the employment-agent, the defender, from the law, of the people whom he exploited and upon whose weaknesses and vices he throve, he won and held fast both the tribute and the allegiance of the vicious and the weak.