at Jake Hess, and after considerable planning decided that his
best chance lay in the fight for the nomination to the Assembly, the
lower house of the Legislature. He picked me as the candidate with whom
he would be most likely to win; and win he did. It was not my fight, it
was Joe's; and it was to him that I owe my entry into politics. I had
at that time neither the reputation nor the ability to have won the
nomination for myself, and indeed never would have thought of trying for
it.

Jake Hess was entirely good-humored about it. In spite of my being
anti-machine, my relations with him had been friendly and human, and
when he was beaten he turned in to help Joe elect me. At first they
thought they would take me on a personal canvass through the saloons
along Sixth Avenue. The canvass, however, did not last beyond the first
saloon. I was introduced with proper solemnity to the saloon-keeper--a
very important personage, for this was before the days when
saloon-keepers became merely the mortgaged chattels of the brewers--and
he began to cross-examine me, a little too much in the tone of one who
was dealing with a suppliant for his favor. He said he expected that I
would of course treat the liquor business fairly; to which I answered,
none too cordially, that I hoped I should treat all interests fairly.
He then said that he regarded the licenses as too high; to which I
responded that I believed they were really not high enough, and that
I should try to have them made higher. The conversation threatened to
become stormy. Messrs. Murray and Hess, on some hastily improvised plea,
took me out into the street, and then Joe explained to me that it was
not worth my while staying in Sixth Avenue any longer, that I had better
go right back to Fifth Avenue and attend to my friends there, and that
he would look after my interests on Sixth Avenue. I was triumphantly
elected.

Once before Joe had interfered in similar fashion and secured the
nomination of an Assemblyman; and shortly after election he had grown
to feel toward this Assemblyman that he must have fed on the meat which
rendered Caesar proud, as he became inaccessible to the ordinary mortals
whose place of resort was Morton Hall. He eyed me warily for a
short time to see if I was likely in this respect to follow in my
predecessor's footsteps. Finding that I did not, he and all my other
friends and supporters assumed toward me the very pleasantest attitude
that it was poss