creatures of the local
ward bosses or of the big municipal bosses, and where they controlled
the appointments the citizens at large had no chance whatever to make
their will felt. Accordingly we fought for the principle, which I
believe to be of universal application, that what is needed in our
popular government is to give plenty of power to a few officials, and to
make these few officials genuinely and readily responsible to the people
for the exercise of that power. Taking away the confirming power of the
Board of Aldermen did not give the citizens of New York good government.
We knew that if they chose to elect the wrong kind of Mayor they would
have bad government, no matter what the form of the law was. But we did
secure to them the chance to get good government if they desired, and
this was impossible as long as the old system remained. The change was
fought in the way in which all similar changes always are fought. The
corrupt and interested politicians were against it, and the battle-cries
they used, which rallied to them most of the unthinking conservatives,
were that we were changing the old constitutional system, that we were
defacing the monuments of the wisdom of the founders of the government,
that we were destroying that distinction between legislative and
executive power which was the bulwark of our liberties, and that we were
violent and unscrupulous radicals with no reverence for the past.

Of course the investigations, disclosures, and proceedings of the
investigating committee of which I was chairman brought me into
bitter personal conflict with very powerful financiers, very powerful
politicians, and with certain newspapers which these financiers and
politicians controlled. A number of able and unscrupulous men were
fighting, some for their financial lives, and others to keep out of
unpleasantly close neighborhood to State's prison. This meant that there
were blows to be taken as well as given. In such political struggles,
those who went in for the kind of thing that I did speedily excited
animosities among strong and cunning men who would stop at little to
gratify their animosity. Any man engaged in this particular type of
militant and practical reform movement was soon made to feel that he had
better not undertake to push matters home unless his own character was
unassailable. On one of the investigating committees on which I served
there was a countryman, a very able man, who, when he reached Ne