In these two statements Mr. Kelly summed up the whole of politics
in Remsen City, in any city anywhere, in the country at large.

Kelly had started life as a blacksmith. But he soon tired of the
dullness and toil and started forth to find some path up to where
men live by making others work for them instead of plodding along
at the hand-to- mouth existence that is the lot of those who live
by their own labors alone. He was a safe blower for a while, but
wisely soon abandoned that fascinating but precarious and
unremunerative career. From card sharp following the circus and
sheet-writer to a bookmaker he graduated into bartender, into
proprietor of a doggery. As every saloon is a political club,
every saloon- keeper is of necessity a politician. Kelly's
woodbox happened to be a convenient place for directing the
floaters and the repeaters. Kelly's political importance grew
apace. His respectability grew more slowly. But it had grown
and was growing.

If you had asked Lizzie, the maid, why she was a Democrat, she
would have given no such foolish reason as the average man gives.

She would not have twaddled about principles--when everyone with
eyeteeth cut ought to know that principles have departed from
politics, now that both parties have been harmonized and
organized into agencies of the plutocracy. She would not have
said she was a Democrat because her father was, or because all
her friends and associates were. She would have replied--in
pleasantly Americanized Irish: