willing to dicker for public spoils with the intrenched majority.

George B. Cox was for thirty years the boss of this city. Events
had prepared the way for him. Following closely upon the war, Tom
Campbell, a crafty criminal lawyer, was the local leader of the
Republicans, and John R. McLean, owner of the Cincinnati
Enquirer, a very rich man, of the Democrats. These two men were
cronies: they bartered the votes of their followers. For some
years crime ran its repulsive course: brawlers, thieves,
cutthroats escaped conviction through the defensive influence of
the lawyer-boss. In 1880, Cox, who had served an apprenticeship
in his brother-in-law's gambling house, was elected to the city
council. Thence he was promoted to the decennial board of
equalization which appraised all real estate every ten years.
There followed a great decrease in the valuation of some of the
choicest holdings in the city. In 1884 there were riots in
Cincinnati. After the acquittal of two brutes who had murdered a
man for a trifling sum of money, exasperated citizens burned the
criminal court house. The barter in justice stopped, but the
barter in offices and in votes continued. The Blaine campaign
then in progress was in great danger. Cox, already a master of
the political game, promised the Republican leaders that if they
would give him a campaign fund he would turn in a Republican
majority from Cincinnati. He did; and for many years thereafter
the returns from Hamilton County, in which Cincinnati is
situated, brought cheer to Republican State headquarters on
election night.

Cox was an unostentatious, silent man, giving one the impression
of sullenness, and almost entirely lacking in those qualities of