"They are not," said Forbes with conviction. "Here they all are blackmailing the tariff, a system the country owes all its prosperity to." "We shall have to pick honest leaders in the future," Luke reflected. He still believed in the power of a party’s individual members. "We’ve simply been too easy-going in the past." Forbes thought this would avail nothing. "The parties themselves are rotten," he declared, "and the deeper a man gets into them, no matter how well he starts out, the more certain he is to be infected. You see how even the good measures are fraudulently put through. Then here’s our own state with a Governor we all believed in—a Democrat, to be sure, but an anti-Tammany man. He comes out for a fine thing like direct primaries. Well, the other day an Assemblyman I know went to him and asked him to sign a bill this Assemblyman wanted passed. What happened? The Governor said: ’Will you vote for the direct primary law?’ The Assemblyman happens to be a fool and against that law. He said he’d vote against it, and he tells me the Governor told him in that case the other bill wouldn’t be signed. No, the thing we need in this country is a brand-new party run by honest business men on sound business principles." Luke could not yet consider such a revolution; but the next day the papers contained further news of the senatorial investigation, which lent weight to Forbes’s opinion. A witness, after testimony further entangling that great financier whose power seemed to pervade the country’s entire industrial system, described an alleged forgery in the books of a railway known to be controlled by Porcellis’s hero and eager to evade the anti-trust laws. According to this witness, a "double entry" of $2,000,000, representing securities that the road assumed in taking over two other roads, was carried in the "Consolidated balance sheet" for some time, then erased from one side of the ledger, and left as a credit balance on the other side. "They took all the securities of the acquired roads," he swore, "and used them as securities for a bond-issue. They got that money and used it to finance two other outside transactions that they sold out at a tremendous profit." He named as participants in this three Senators high in the councils of Luke’s party. "Of course they’re a bad lot," Leighton cheerfully admitted when the District-Attorney’s staff gossiped about the latest revelation, "and the party is no better right here in New York than it is in any other state. But you can’t repair an organization by smashing it. What we need is reform within the party. The party must reform itself. And that’s what I’m trying to bring about."