Some of this legislative bargaining was revealed in the insurance
investigation of 1905, conducted by the Armstrong Committee with
Charles E. Hughes as counsel. Officers of the New York Life
Insurance Company testified that their company had given $50,000
to the Republican campaign of 1904. An item of $235,000,
innocently charged to "Home office annex account," was traced to
the hands of a notorious lobbyist at Albany. Three insurance
companies had paid regularly $50,000 each to the Republican
campaign fund. Boss Platt himself was compelled reluctantly to
relate how he had for fifteen years received ten one thousand
dollar bundles of greenbacks from the Equitable Life as
"consideration" for party goods delivered. John A. McCall,
President of the New York Life, said: "I don't care about the
Republican side of it or the Democratic side of it. It doesn't
count at all with me. What is best for the New York Life moves
and actuates me."

In another investigation Mr. H. O. Havemeyer of the Sugar Trust
said: "We have large interests in this State; we need police
protection and fire protection; we need everything that the city
furnishes and gives, and we have to support these things. Every
individual and corporation and firm--trust or whatever you call
it--does these things and we do them." No distinction is made,
then, between the government that ought to furnish this
"protection" and the machine that sells it!

No episode in recent political history shows better the relations
of the legislature to the political machine and the great power
of invisible government than the impeachment and removal of