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 leech
upon his veins--difficult though this task was, Victor Dorn knew