"I'm not going to rob a bank, am I?" urged the younger man. "You are going to rob yourself," was the swift answer. "You are going to rob your children, if you ever have any, of what your father left you--the priceless heritage of an honored name." "Come, now, Judge," said Van Dyne, "is that quite fair? You speak as if I were going to enroll in the Forty Thieves." "If I thought you capable of doing that I should not be speaking to you at all," was the reply. "Pat McCann isn't a bad fellow really," the young man declared. "He means well enough. And the rest of them are not rascals, either; they are not the crew of pirates the papers call them. They are giving the city as good a government now as our mixed population will stand. They have their ambition to do right; and I sincerely believe that they mean to do the best they know how." "That's it precisely," the Judge asserted. "They mean to do the best they know how. But how much do they know?" "Well, they are not exactly fools, are they?" was the evasive answer. "Don't misunderstand me," the elder man continued. "I am perfectly aware that the organization is not so black as it is painted. The men at the head of it are not a crew of pirates, as you say--of course not; if they were they would have been made to walk the plank long ago. Probably they mean well, as you say again. I should be sorry to believe that they do not." "Well, then--" returned Van Dyne. But the Judge went on, regardless of what the young lawyer was going to say: "They may mean well, but what of it if the result is what we see? The fact is that the men at the head of the organization are of an arrested type of civilization. They are two or three hundred years behind the age. They have retained the methods--perhaps not of Claude Duval, as their enemies allege, but of Sir Robert Walpole, as their friends could not deny. Here in America to-day they are anachronisms. They stand athwart our advance. I have no wish to call them names or to think them worse than they are; but I know that association with them is not good for you or for me. It is our duty--your duty and mine, and the duty of all who have a little enlightenment--to arouse the public against these survivals of a lower stage, and to fight them incessantly, and now and then to beat them, so that they may be made to respect our views. You say they are giving the city as good a government as our mixed population will stand. Well, that may be true; I don't think it is quite true; but even if it is, what of it? Are we to be satisfied with that? The best way to educate our mixed population to stand a better government is to fight these fellows steadily. Nothing educates them more than an election, followed by an object lesson."