good-natured honest thieves, they were independent of party bosses and “the organizations,” which were busy at their own graft. They were so unbusinesslike that business men went into the City Council to reduce the festival of blackmail to decent and systematic bribery. These men helped matters some, but the happy-go-lucky spirit persisted until the advent of Charles T. Yerkes from Philadelphia, who, with his large experience of Pennsylvania methods, first made boodling a serious business. He had to go right into politics himself to get anything done. But he did get things done. The aldermanic combine was fast selling out the city to its “best citizens,” when some decent men spoke up and called upon the people to stop it, the people who alone can stop such things.
And the people of Chicago stopped it; they have beaten boodling. That is about all they have done so far, but that is about all they have tried deliberately and systematically to do, and the way they have done that proves that they can do anything they set out to do. They worry about the rest; half free, they are not half satisfied and not half done. But boodling, with its backing of “big men” and “big interests,” is the hardest evil a democracy has to fight, and a people who can beat it can beat anything.
238Every community,
