That is not materially different from what happened when Mr. Bryan was first nominated for the Presidency against Mr. McKinley--except that it did not take so long to accomplish. I have said that Mr. Bryan's nomination could have been defeated if a certain local delegation had been "attended to" in advance. What is to be noted is that Mr. Crooks has been nominated simply because he had a hold which could not be shaken on a small but compact body of men at Woolwich. It is true that it is not often that so dramatic a thing would happen as the nomination of Mr. Crooks himself but more frequently an arrangement--a "trade" or "deal"--would be entered into by which in consideration of the Crooks vote being thrown to one or other of the leading candidates, in the event of the latter's defeating Mr. Balfour and being elected to the Premiership, certain political advantages, in the form of appointments to office and "patronage" generally, would accrue, not necessarily to Mr. Crooks himself, but to his "machine," the citizens of Woolwich, and the Liberal party in the County of Kent at large. We see here how the local "boss" may become all-powerful in national affairs (and this is of course only one of fifty ways) and how the interdependence of the party in the nation with the party organisation in the County or the municipality tends to the fattening of the latter and, it must be added, the debauching of all three. At the last general election in England, in January, 1906, there is no doubt that the Conservative party owed the loss of a large number of seats merely to the fact that it had been in office for so long, without serious conflict, that the local party organisations had not merely grown rusty but were practically defunct. In the United States the same thing, in anything like the same degree, would be impossible, because between the periods of the general elections (which themselves come every four years) come the State and municipal elections for the purposes of which the local party organisations are kept in continuous and more or less active existence. A State or a city may, of course, be so confirmedly Republican or Democratic that, even though elections be frequent, the ruling party organisation will become, in a measure, soft and careless, but it can never sink altogether out of fighting condition. When a general election comes round, each great party in the nation possesses--or organises for the occasion--a national committee as well as a national campaign organisation; but that committee and that national organisation co-operate with the local organisations in each State and city and it is the local organisations that really do the work--the same organisations as conduct the fight, in intermediate years, for the election of members to the State Legislature or of a mayor and aldermen. And each of those local organisations necessarily tends to come under the control of a recognised "boss."