ties 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 pe