Part 18

"Oh, yes, we kin take care of it, all right. Only, I don't want to do nothing without consulting you."

In these two statements Mr. Kelly summed up the whole of politics in Remsen City, in any city anywhere, in the country at large.

Kelly had started life as a blacksmith. But he soon tired of the dullness and toil and started forth to find some path up to where men live by making others work for them instead of plodding along at the hand-to-mouth existence that is the lot of those who live by their own labors alone. He was a safe blower for a while, but wisely soon abandoned that fascinating but precarious and unremunerative career. From card sharp following the circus and sheet-writer to a bookmaker he graduated into bartender, into proprietor of a doggery. As every saloon is a political club, every saloon-keeper is of necessity a politician. Kelly's woodbox happened to be a convenient place for directing the floaters and the repeaters. Kelly's political importance grew apace. His respectability grew more slowly. But it had grown and was growing.

If you had asked Lizzie, the maid, why she was a Democrat, she would have given no such foolish reason as the average man gives.

She would not have twaddled about principles--when everyone with eyeteeth cut ought to know that principles have departed from politics, now that both parties have been harmonized and organized into agencies of the plutocracy. She would not have said she was a Democrat because her father was, or because all her friends and associates were. She would have replied--in pleasantly Americanized Irish:

"I'm a Democrat because when my father got too old to work, Mr. House, the Democrat leader, gave him a job on the elevator at the Court House--though that dirty thief and scoundrel, Kelly, the Republican boss, owned all the judges and county officers. And when my brother lost his place as porter because he took a drink too many, Mr. House gave him a card to the foreman of the gas company, and he went to work at eight a week and is there yet."

Mr. Kelly and Mr. House belong to a maligned and much misunderstood class. Whenever you find anywhere in nature an activity of any kind, however pestiferous its activity may seem to you--or however good--you may be sure that if you look deep enough you will find that that activity has a use, arises from a need. The "robber trusts" and the political bosses are interesting examples of this basic truth. They have arisen because science, revolutionizing human society, has compelled it to organize. The organization is crude and clumsy and stupid, as yet, because men are ignorant, are experimenting, are working in the dark. So, the organizing forces are necessarily crude and clumsy and stupid.

Mr. Hastings was--all unconsciously--organizing society industrially. Mr. Kelly--equally unconscious of the true nature of his activities--was organizing society politically. And as industry and politics are--and ever have been--at bottom two names for identically the same thing, Mr. Hastings and Mr. Kelly were bound sooner or later to get together.

Remsen City was organized like every other large or largish community. There were two clubs--the Lincoln and the Jefferson--which well enough represented the "respectable elements"--that is, those citizens who were of the upper class. There were two other clubs--the Blaine and the Tilden--which were similarly representative of the "rank and file" and, rather, of the petty officers who managed the rank and file and voted it and told it what to think and what not to think, in exchange taking care of the needy sick, of the aged, of those out of work and so on. Martin Hastings--the leading Republican citizen of Remsen City, though for obvious reasons his political activities were wholly secret and stealthy--was the leading spirit in the Lincoln Club. Jared Olds--Remsen City's richest and most influential Democrat, the head of the gas company and the water company--was foremost in the Jefferson Club. At the Lincoln and the Jefferson you rarely saw any but "gentlemen"--men of established position and fortune, deacons and vestrymen, judges, corporation lawyers and the like. The Blaine and the Tilden housed a livelier and a far less select class--the "boys"--the active politicians, the big saloon keepers, the criminal lawyers, the gamblers, the chaps who knew how to round up floaters and to handle gangs of repeaters, the active young sports working for political position, by pitching and carrying for the political leaders, by doing their errands of charity or crookedness or what not. Joe House was the "big shout" at the Tilden; Dick Kelly could be found every evening on the third--or "wine," or plotting--floor of the Blaine--found holding court. And very respectful indeed were even the most eminent of Lincoln, or Jefferson, respectabilities who sought him out there to ask favors of him.

The bosses tend more and more to become mere flunkeys of the plutocrats. Kelly belonged to the old school of boss, dating from the days when social organization was in the early stages, when the political organizer was feared and even served by the industrial organizer, the embryo plutocrats. He realized how necessary he was to his plutocratic master, and he made that master treat him almost as an equal. He was exacting ever larger pay for taking care of the voters and keeping them fooled; he was getting rich, and had as yet vague aspirations to respectability and fashion. He had stopped drinking, had "cut out the women," had made a beginning toward a less inelegant way of speaking the language. His view of life was what is called cynical. That is, he regarded himself as morally the equal of the respectable rulers of society--or of the preachers who attended to the religious part of the grand industry of "keeping the cow quiet while it was being milked."

But Mr. Kelly was explaining to Martin Hastings what he meant when he said that there was "hell to pay":

"That infernal little cuss, Victor Dorn," said he "made a speech in the Court House Square to-day. Of course, none of the decent papers--and they're all decent except his'n--will publish any of it. Still, there was about a thousand people there before he got through--and the thing'll spread."

"Speech?--what about?" said Hastings. "He's always shooting off his mouth. He'd better stop talking and go to work at some honest business."

"He's got on to the fact that this strike is a put-up job--that the company hired labor detectives in Chicago last winter to come down here and get hold of the union. He gave names--amounts paid--the whole damn thing."

"Um," said Hastings, rubbing his skinny hands along the shiny pantaloons over his meagre legs. "Um."

"But that ain't all," pursued Kelly. "He read out a list of the men told off to pretend to set fire to the car barns and start the riot--those Chicago chaps, you know."

"I don't know anything about it," said Hastings sharply.

Kelly smiled slightly--amused scorn. It seemed absurd to him for the old man to keep up the pretense of ignorance. In fact, Hastings was ignorant--of the details. He was not quite the aloof plutocrat of the modern school, who permits himself to know nothing of details beyond the dividend rate and similar innocent looking results of causes at which sometimes hell itself would shudder. But, while he was more active than the conscience-easing devices now working smoothly made necessary, he never permitted himself to know any unnecessary criminal or wicked fact about his enterprises.

"I don't know," he repeated. "And I don't want to know."

"Anyhow, Dorn gave away the whole thing. He even read a copy of your letter of introduction to the governor--the one you--according to Dorn--gave Fillmore when you sent him up to the Capitol to arrange for the invitation to come after the riot."

Hastings knew that the boss was deliberately "rubbing it in" because Hastings--that is, Hastings' agents had not invited Kelly to assist in the project for "teaching the labor element a much needed lesson." But knowledge of Kelly's motive did not make the truth he was telling any less true--the absurd mismanagement of the whole affair, with the result that Dorn seemed in the way to change it from a lesson to labor on the folly of revolt against their kind and generous but firm employers into a provoker of fresh and fiercer revolt--effective revolt--political revolt. So, as Kelly "rubbed," Hastings visibly winced and writhed.

Kelly ended his recital with: "The speech created a hell of a sensation, Mr. Hastings. That young chap can talk."

"Yes," snapped Hastings. "But he can't do anything else."

"I'm not so sure of that," replied Kelly, who was wise enough to realize the value of a bogey like Dorn--its usefulness for purposes of "throwing a scare into the silk-stocking crowd." "Dorn's getting mighty strong with the people."

"Stuff and nonsense!" retorted Hastings. "They'll listen to any slick tongued rascal that roasts those that are more prosperous than they are. But when it comes to doing anything, they know better. They envy and hate those that give them jobs, but they need the jobs."

"There's a good deal of truth in that, Mr. Hastings," said Kelly, who was nothing if not judicial. "But Dorn's mighty plausible. I hear sensible men saying there's something more'n hot air in his facts and figgures." Kelly paused, and made the pause significant.

"About that last block of traction stock, Mr. Hastings. I thought you were going to let me in on the ground floor. But I ain't heard nothing."

"You ARE in," said Hastings, who knew when to yield. "Hasn't Barker been to see you? I'll attend to it, myself."