large banks in different parts of the state,
including one at the capital, that these checks were to be cashed
without question, no matter who presented them, provided there was a
certain flourish under the line where the amount was written in figures.
Sometimes these checks were signed by the corporation, and sometimes
they were the personal checks of the president or some other high
official. Often the signature was that of a person wholly disconnected,
so far as the public knew. Once, I remember, Roebuck sent me a thousand
dollar check signed by a distinguished Chicago lawyer who was just then
counsel to his opponent in a case involving millions, a case which
Roebuck afterward won!

Who presented these checks? I could more easily say who did not.

From the very beginning of my control I kept my promise to reduce the
cost of the political business to my clients. When I got the machine
thoroughly in hand, I saw I could make it cost them less than a third of
what they had been paying, on the average, for ten years. I cut off,
almost at a stroke, a horde of lobbyists, lawyers, threateners without
influence, and hangers-on of various kinds. I reduced the payments for
legislation to a system, instead of the shameless, scandal-creating and
wasteful auctioneering that had been going on for years.

In fact, so cheaply did I run the machine that I saw it would be most
imprudent to let my clients have the full benefit. Cheapness would have
made them uncontrollably greedy and exacting, and would have given them
a wholly false idea of my value as soon as it had slipped their short
memories how dearly they used to pay.

So I continued to make heavy assessments, and put by the surplus in a
reserve fund for emergencies. I thought, for example, that I might some
day have trouble with one or more members of my combine; my reserve
would supply me with the munitions for forcing insurgents to return to
their agreements.

This fund was in no sense part of my private fortune. Nowhere else, I
think, do the eccentricities of conscience show themselves more
interestingly than in the various attitudes of the various political
leaders toward the large sums which the exigencies of commercialized
politics place absolutely and secretly under their control. I have no
criticism for any of these attitudes.

I have lived long enough and practically enough to learn not to
criticize the morals of men, any more than I criticize their facial
conto