The dominion of the great business interests over politics was the rapid growth of about twenty years--the consolidations of business naturally producing concentrations of the business world's political power in the hands of the few controllers of the big railway, industrial and financial combines. Goodrich had happened to be acquainted with some of the most influential of these business "kings"; they naturally made him their agent for the conveying of their wishes and their bribes of one kind and another to the national managers of both parties. They knew little of the details of practical politics, knew only what they needed in their businesses; and as long as they got that, it did not interest them what was done with the rest of the power their "campaign contributions" gave. With such resources any man of good intelligence and discretion could have got the same results as Goodrich's. He was simply a lackey, strutting and cutting a figure in his master's clothes and under his master's name. He was pitifully vain of his reputation as a Machiavelli and a go-between. Vanity is sometimes a source of great strength; but vanity of that sort, and about a position in which secrecy is the prime requisite, could mean only weakness. Throughout his eight years of control of our party it had had possession of all departments of the national administration--except of the House of Representatives during the past two years. This meant the uninterrupted and unchecked reign of the interests. To treat with consideration the interests, the strong men of the country, they who must have a free hand for developing its resources, to give them privileges and immunities beyond what can be permitted the ordinary citizen or corporation--that is a course which, however offensive to abstract justice, still has, as it seems to me, a practical justice in it, and, at any rate, must be pursued so long as the masses of the voters are short-sighted, unreasoning and in nose-rings to political machines. A man's rights, whatever they may be in theory, are in practice only what he has the intelligence and the power to compel. But, for the sake of the nation, for the upholding of civilization itself, these over-powerful interests should never be given their heads, should be restrained as closely as may be to their rights--their _practical_ rights. Goodrich had neither the sagacity nor the patriotism--nor the force of will, for that matter--to keep them within the limits of decency and discretion. Hence the riot of plunder and privilege which revolted and alarmed me when I came to Washington and saw politics in the country-wide, yes, history-wide, horizon of that view-point.