The League “made good.” Of the twenty-six outgoing aldermen with bad records, sixteen were not renominated. Of the ten who were, four were beaten at the polls. The League’s recommendations were followed in twenty-five wards; they were disregarded in five; in some wards no fight was made. A victory so extraordinary would have satisfied some reformers. Others would have been inflated by it and ruined. These men became canny. They chose this propitious moment to get rid of the committee of One Hundred respectables. Such a body is all very well to launch a reform, when no one knows that it is going to do serious work; but, as the Cole committee had learned, representative men with many interests can be reached. The little committee incorporated the League, then called together the big committee, congratulated it, and proposed a constitution and by-laws which would throw all the work—and all the power—to the little committee. The little committee was to call on the big committee only as money or some “really important” help was needed. The big committee approved, swelled up, adjourned, and that is the last time it has ever met. Thus free of “pulls,” gentlemanly pulls, but pulls just the same, the “nine” became nine by adding two—Allen B. Pond and Francis Lackner—and prepared for the next campaign. Their aldermen, the “reform crowd,” in the City Council were too few to do anything alone, but they could protest, and they did. They adopted the system of William Kent, which was to find out what was going on and tell it in Council meetings. “If you go on giving away the people’s franchises like this,” Alderman Harlan would say, “you may wake up some morning to find street lamps are useful for other purposes than lighting the streets.” Or, “Some night the citizens, who are watching you, may come down here from the galleries with pieces of hemp in their hands.” Then he would picture an imagined scene of the galleries rising and coming down upon the floor. He made his descriptions so vivid and creepy that they made some aldermen fidget. “I don’t like dis business all about street lamps and hemp—vot dot is?” said a German boodler one night. “We don’t come here for no such a business.” “We meant only to make head-lines for the papers,” said one of the reform aldermen. “If we could keep the attention of the public upon the Council we could make clear what was going on there, and that would put meaning into our next campaign. And we certainly did fill the galleries and the newspapers.”