high political function deserving signal recognition. Look at Mr. John Wanamaker, whose only title to rank as a statesman, when he was made a Cabinet Minister, consisted in the collection of a large electioneering fund, to be spent where it would do the most good by his brother statesman, Matt Quay. And the frankness and gravity with which party managers nowadays discuss the statistics of purchasable voters—floaters, so called—and the methods of buying and watching them, shows this part of party warfare to have risen to the dignity of a recognized and important branch of the science of practical politics, and its masters are gratefully praised as “peerless leaders.”
As to the machine, we are sometimes told by well-meaning persons that some sort of a party machine is necessary. Let us distinguish. Public-spirited citizens form a party because they have substantially the same objects of public interest in view; they seek to serve these objects by organized effort, and to that end form committees and clubs and whatever else an effective organization requires, all being composed of men animated with the desire of furthering the same public ends. This is a healthy, legitimate party organization. What is the machine? An organization within a party, composed of officeholders or officeseekers, or both, who ostensibly serve a public cause for the purpose of having that cause serve them; politicians clubbed together for mutual support and benefit; well disciplined under shrewd and energetic leaders; seeking, in the first place, to rule the party to which they belong, so as to make its victory their spoil; striving to control its caucuses and nominating conventions so that only such men be selected for public positions of power and emolument as can be depended upon to serve their interests, and caring little or nothing for any cause or any party or any candidate, unless their interest is served. They may sometimes support, with apparent
