whom I will call Brogan. He looked like a serious elderly frog. I
never heard him speak more than once. It was before the Legislature was
organized, or had adopted any rules; and each day the only business was
for the clerk to call the roll. One day Brogan suddenly rose, and the
following dialogue occurred:

Brogan. Misther Clu-r-r-k!
The Clerk. The gentleman from New York.
Brogan. I rise to a point of ordher under the rules!
The Clerk. There are no rules.
Brogan. Thin I object to them!
The Clerk. There are no rules to object to.
Brogan. Oh! [nonplussed; but immediately recovering himself].
Thin I move that they be amended until there ar-r-re!

The deadlock was tedious; and we hailed with joy such enlivening
incidents as the above.

During my three years' service in the Legislature I worked on a very
simple philosophy of government. It was that personal character and
initiative are the prime requisites in political and social life. It
was not only a good but an absolutely indispensable theory as far as it
went; but it was defective in that it did not sufficiently allow for
the need of collective action. I shall never forget the men with whom
I worked hand in hand in these legislative struggles, not only my
fellow-legislators, but some of the newspaper reporters, such as Spinney
and Cunningham; and then in addition the men in the various districts
who helped us. We had made up our minds that we must not fight fire with
fire, that on the contrary the way to win out was to equal our foes in
practical efficiency and yet to stand at the opposite plane from them in