My introduction to politics was in the Fifth Ward of Jersey City, New Jersey, which for many years was the "Bloody Angle" of politics of the city in which I lived. Always Democratic, it had been for many years the heart and centre of what New Jersey Democrats were pleased to call the great Gibraltar of Democracy. The ward in which I lived was made up of the plainest sort of people, a veritable melting pot of all races, but with a predominance of Irish, Germans, and Italians, between whom it was, like ancient Gaul, divided into three parts. My dear father, Philip Tumulty, a wounded soldier of the Civil War, after serving an apprenticeship as an iron moulder under a delightful, whole- souled Englishman, opened a little grocery store on Wayne Street, Jersey City, where were laid the foundation stones of his modest fortune and where, by his fine common sense, poise, and judgment, he soon established himself as the leader of a Democratic faction in that neighbourhood. This modest little place soon became a political laboratory for me. In the evening, around the plain, old-fashioned counters, seated upon barrels and boxes, the interesting characters of the neighbourhood gathered, representing as they did the leading active political forces in that quaint cosmopolitan community. No matter how far back my memory turns, I cannot recall when I did not hear politics discussed—not ward politics only, but frequently the politics of the nation and the world. In that grocery store, from the lips of the plainest folk who came there, were carried on serious discussions of the tariff, the money question, our foreign relations, and all phases of the then famous Venezuelan question, which in those days threatened to set two continents on fire. The make-up of the little "cabinet" or group which surrounded my father was most interesting. There was Mr. Alexander Hamill, the father of Congressman Hamill of Jersey City, a student of Queen's College in Ireland and who afterward taught in the National Schools of Ireland, a well-read, highly cultured, broad-minded man of affairs; and dear Uncle Jimmie Kelter, almost a centenarian, whose fine old gray hair gave him the appearance of a patriarch. Uncle Jimmie nightly revelled in the recital to those who were present as ready listeners, his experience when he was present at a session of the House of Parliament in London and heard the famous Irish statesman, Daniel O'Connell, denounce England's attitude of injustice toward Catholic emancipation. He loved to regale the little group that encircled him by reciting from memory the great speech of Robert Emmett from the dock, and excerpts from the classic speeches of the leading Irish orators like Curran, Sheridan, and Fox.