Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/230

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in destroying the superstition of party regularity. I say defeated the machines, when perhaps I should say checked the machines, since the bosses remained and the partizans who made them possible. And the public utilities were in private hands, the street railway company still was there, desperate because its franchises were about to expire, and its securities, through the financiering too familiar to America in these latter days, six times the amount of its actual investment. And down at Columbus, the legislature still was sitting, controlled by rural members who knew nothing of cities or of city life or city problems, farmers and country lawyers and the politicians of small towns, who, in the historic opposition of the ruralite to the urbanite, could not only favor their party confreres and conspirators from the city—machine politicians to whom they turned for advice—but gain a cheap réclame at home by opposing every measure designed to set the cities free. Thus the bosses in both parties, the machine politicians, the corporations, and their lawyers, promoters, lobbyists, kept editors, ward heelers, office holders, spies, and parasites of every kind were lying in wait on every hand. And besides, though inspired by other motives, the "good" people were always insisting on the "moral" issue; urging us to turn aside from our larger immediate purpose, and concentrate our official attention on the "bad" people—and wreck our movement. Our immediate purpose was to defeat the effort of the street railway company to obtain a franchise, to prevent it from performing the miracle of transmuting twenty-five