The iniquity, ignorance and indifference that create and maintain a system of municipal administration based on the theory that politics is a profession, and each promoter the architect of his own fortune, to be built at the expense of the citizens, is the reflection of the character of the citizens. The system is never the product of one man's brains, nor does its growth ever begin at the top. It begins always in the smallest political unit, where the man who wishes the office in the gift of that unit stands closest to the people. The bargaining for votes begins there. The number of exchanges of votes for favors and places successfully accomplished makes the "boss," the man who represents law and order; who is judge, and jury, and keeper of the jail to those who do his bidding. As the political units develop their bosses--"leaders," in voters' parlance--the system grows until the chain is complete, and each political henchman, in the order of his importance, takes his share of the people's money. The perquisites reach millions before the thousands are distributed that enables the leader to pose as the all-pervading friend to the district in time of need. The political units where this system of government in the interest of the "boss" have their strongest hold are the best evidences of the moral degeneracy that follows. Here the liquor saloons flourish, the headquarters of the "leader" and his cohorts, used in the order of rank in the system, from the gayly lighted, silver-bedecked, mirror-lined bar-room to the smoky, dirty, vilely kept den where those gather who have no use in life but to vote according to orders and work for the political leader's entrenchment. These saloons represent the primary school and the university of the voters of the district. They represent all the educational and recreative opportunity of most of the adults. They establish the habits of thinking for the majority of the people, for they are the lyceum where all questions are discussed that interest the people. The most interesting is how to get wages, as it is the most important. The common struggle creates common bonds of sympathy. All principles go down before the concrete, understandable fact that if the "boss" is beaten, work will cease for neighbor, friend, and friend's friend. Each man learns through every course in this training school of citizens that the paramount duty of each voter is to keep the "boss" in power. It means wages, or the hope of wages, under the least strenuous of employers, the city. Men work hard for the system, not because the moral nature of many of them is not in revolt against the system, but because the keeping of a home for wife and children is at stake. Often the voter's necessities, his ignorance often, his rebellion against wealth often, his unrest, undermine his moral nature, blind his intelligence, and he forges the chains that bind him in slavery to a system