d pocket
knife, or Tony Rivers and Joe House.

When Victor Dorn had first begun to educate and organize the people of
Remsen City, the boss industry was in its early form. That is, Kelly
and House were really rivals in the collecting of big campaign funds by
various forms of blackmail, in struggling for offices for themselves
and their followers, in levying upon vice and crime through the police.
In these ways they made the money, the lion's share of which naturally
fell to them as leaders, as organizers of plunder. But that stage had
now passed in Remsen City as it had passed elsewhere, and the boss
industry had taken a form far more difficult to combat. Kelly and
House no longer especially cared whether Republican party or Democratic
won. Their business--their source of revenue--had ceased to be through
carrying elections, had become a matter of skill in keeping the people
more or less evenly divided between the two "regular" parties, with an
occasional fake third party to discourage and bring into contempt
reform movers and to make the people say, "Well, bad as they are, at
least the regulars aren't addle-headed, damn fools doing nothing except
to make business bad." Both Kelly and House were supported and
enriched by the corporations and by big public contracting companies
and by real estate deals. Kelly still appropriated a large part of the
"campaign fund." House, in addition, took a share of the money raised
by the police from dives. But these sums were but a small part of
their income, were merely pin money for their wives and children.

Yet--at heart and in all sincerity Kelly was an ardent Republican and
House was a ferocious Democrat. If you had asked either what
Republican and Democrat meant he would have been as vague and
unsatisfactory in his reply as would have been any of his followers
bearing torch and oilcloth cape in political processions, with no hope
of gain--beyond the exquisite pleasure of making a shouting ass of
himself in the most public manner. But for all that, Kelly was a
Republican and House a Democrat. It is not a strange, though it is a
profoundly mysterious, phenomenon, that of the priest who arranges the
trick mechanism of the god, yet being a devout believer, ready to die
for his "faith."

Difficult though the task was of showing the average Remsen City man
that Republican and Democrat, Kelly and House, were one and the same
thing, and that thing a blood-sucking, blood-heavy