There were, however, plenty of good men in politics, men who either came from districts where there was popular control, or who represented a genuine aspiration towards good citizenship on the part of some boss or group of bosses, or else who had been nominated frankly for reasons of expediency by bosses whose attitude towards good citizenship was at best one of Gallio-like indifference.

At the time when I was nominated for Governor, as later when Mr.Hughes was nominated and renominated for Governor, there was no possibility of securing the nomination unless the bosses permitted it.

In each case the bosses, the machine leaders, took a man for whom they did not care, because he was the only man with whom they could win.

In the case of Mr.Hughes there was of course also the fact of pressure from the National Administration.

But the bosses were never overcome in a fair fight, when they had made up their minds to fight, until the Saratoga Convention in 1910, when Mr.Stimson was nominated for Governor.
Senator Platt had the same inborn capacity for the kind of politics which he liked that many big Wall Street men have shown for not wholly dissimilar types of finance.