counties in
Delaware--Newcastle, Kent, and Sussex) were allowed to stand as
received, all Addicks' efforts to control the Legislature would have
been fruitless and his "made dollars" expended for nothing. The ex-flour
dealer of Philadelphia was not satisfied to accept the people's sacred
verdict. He quickly called his lieutenants together, mapped out a
campaign of almost reckless audacity and daring, and assigned his best
men to its execution.

The ballot-boxes with their contents were in the sheriff's charge and
stored under lock and key in the court-house. The sheriff was an Addicks
tool. At midnight he turned over his charge to one of the would-be
statesman's trustiest lieutenants, who, with the aid of a lantern and a
slip of paper containing the directions, sorted over the legal ballots,
threw some out, and put in new ones. When another sun arose the
dastardly outrage upon the American elective franchise had been
completed, and Addicks was busily scheming to carry out the remainder of
the plot. On the declaration which he or one of his associates would
make, that there had been fraud in Sussex County, the Government at
Washington must send on an investigating committee to whom it would be
asserted that the voting lists had been doctored by the Democrats. To
prove it the boxes would be opened, the ballots counted, and lo! the
villany of the Democrats would be, beyond contradiction, demonstrated.

But the scheme was an Addicks scheme. Had it been the plot of any other
man with the brains, the nerve, and the lack of principle to concoct it
and set it in motion, inevitably it would have been carried through to
the designed conclusion. As it was, this is what happened: The
lieutenant who had charge of the actual commission of the crime
thoughtlessly chuckled over the details of it with another, and this
other "in the presence of witnesses" laughingly congratulated Addicks on
his plan's success. What was the astonishment of the group to hear the
candidate for the Senate say: "Gentlemen, I could not countenance such a
transaction. This is the first I have heard of it, and it is so
outrageously criminal that I refuse to allow it to proceed further.
There will be no investigation, and if it is a fact that those ballots
have been changed in the box, the ones who changed them shall receive no
benefit from their nefarious work. I have spoken."

Mind you, every member of the group was a party to the scheme and had
been caref