The supposition that the boss arises by virtue of his strong personality; that he is an organizer, a general, one born to command; that the “machine” is the product of his skill and genius, and that no one who does not possess the same elements of character can follow him, is wrong. The municipal boss is an effect rather than a cause. He is the product of certain forces, working under certain conditions, and so long as the forces are unchecked and the conditions unchanged, a new boss must inevitably be created to fill the place of every one the people may dethrone. In municipal politics, the boss comes into being at the point where the criminal rich come in contact with the criminal poor. The criminal rich desire franchise privileges, which are among the most productive and valuable of all forms of property. How valuable they are may be better understood if we remember that a recent conservative writer estimates the franchise values of Greater New York at four hundred and fifty millions of dollars, a staggering sum, but the real market value of actual property which has been virtually stolen from the people. Property, too, of great earning power as compared with most other investments, capable of paying almost unlimited dividends; and often giving its possessors control over all other branches of business, even over life itself. And this property, amounting to half a billion dollars in New York alone and to an incalculable sum in the cities of the whole United States, has been appropriated by the criminal rich through the agency of the municipal boss. In order to consummate these thefts, the franchise grabbers must have a purchasable city council. To elect and maintain a purchasable city council two things are necessary: a division of the “good” citizens against each other, and a boss to unify and keep solid the criminal poor as a balance of power. The “good” citizens—by this term I mean the great mass of fairly well-meaning people—are kept divided by the extension of national political interests into municipal affairs. This division is the first condition essential to the development of the boss. The criminal poor—meaning not merely professional criminals, but all who gamble, get drunk, have occasional fights, and are liable to get into trouble with the police—having with them the saloons, dives and all the hosts of graft and shady business, hold the balance of power. The boss maintains his hold upon them by means of his ability to help them out of trouble. The first step of the boss must be to corrupt the police force and the justices’ courts. This is not hard, for the police and the justices are usually very anxious to be corrupted; it pays them much better to be corrupt than to be honest. So the boss comes in as a business agent between the criminal poor and the police, enabling the criminal to escape punishment, and the police to get rich by sharing in the profits of crime.