“To ring off; we left the machines and horses for the natives to get up guessing parties with, and with our machinery repaired steamed out to the open water. Tib never made any advances to Her Lordship after once aboard, although she eyed him with a soft look whenever they met on deck during the run to port. “‘My old heart got foolish, boy,’ he remarked to me the night we landed, ‘but it’s beating all right now.’ Yet he always kept a handkerchief she dropped. “And wherever the show played Tib coined money by the barrel, for Her Lordship’s people boomed his game early and late. But Tib got to believing it was because the show was so good. For, you see, he’d explain to me as he counted the receipts, ‘Little Eva is dying better every night.’” _Corrupt Practices in Elections_ BY HON. LUCIUS F. C. GARVIN _Ex-Governor of Rhode Island_ Efforts to expose bribery and other corrupt practices in elections are met with the cry, You are defaming the state! If there are governmental evils, we are told, prove them to the bottom and correct them quietly. Such a course may be feasible if applied to a private business, but in public affairs, in the nature of the case, it cannot be successful. Certainly none of the persons who directly profit by such practices will correct them—not the “respectable” men of means who furnish the funds and who do so with a view to recouping themselves in some way as a result of the election; not the workers who handle the corruption fund, taking good care to see that they themselves are rewarded for the trouble and risk involved; not the individuals who pocket the money disbursed, and in this way become always morally, and often criminally, confederates; nor, finally, the few who secure the offices through fraudulent methods. In fact, nothing has been found effective outside of that strongest of all influences in a free country, the force of public opinion. The many, who are made aware of the iniquity by suffering from it, have every inducement to end it. Over and over again, in great crises, the American people have shown themselves to be patriotic, honest and wise. This has happened whenever the masses have been aroused by serious threats of danger, either external or internal. The real danger to our institutions lies, not in great crises, but rather in a gradual, almost insensible, deterioration of the government, due either to a lack of vigilance on the part of the people or to a paralysis of their latent powers. While it is possible that the immense fund of good will and good sense possessed by the American people may be expended in private pursuits and thus diverted from a control of their own government, the far greater danger is that the mighty influences being put forth at almost every election will rupture completely the natural dependence of public officials upon the electorate.