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56 committeemen of the powerful and alert central region of the state, and of the remoter Egypt, would scarcely have received the state committee's call before the Cook county committee had acted. With but ten days' notice for the Cook county primaries, the citizens of Chicago—who since then have become exceedingly unfriendly to Governor Tanner, and at that time knew little about him—would be taken unawares, and before they had entertained a thought of the coming election. Secondary to these motives of gaining the time vantage in the state and county fields, the county politicians of Cook were anxious to avoid complications with national politics, for the rich prize of Chicago was already becoming a bone of contention among the presidential aspirants.

Accordingly, by a secret caucus on the third of February, they put the finishing touches upon their county slate, and on the next day issued their call. The lusty outcry of the city newspapers availed nothing. Neither did a denunciatory mass-meeting assembled February 10, on the ringing appeal of a score of the city's most prominent Republicans. The "snap" time schedule succeeded. At once the men who planned it found themselves in control of Cook county's delegation to the state convention; that is, of more than one-fourth of the convention's membership; or, to be exact, of 372 delegates, where the rest of the state was entitled to 963. Of the one hundred and one other counties no one was entitled to more than twenty-seven delegates. This capture of Cook practically ended the contest of the aspirants for the state offices, for, to go back still earlier, these same Cook county managers had, in November, 1895, entered into a conditional alliance with Egypt. They had gone on a railway pilgrimage, had skirted the broad central part of Illinois, had crossed the Mississippi into St. Louis. There they had met one hundred and more Republican politicians of southern Illinois, a section where the petty local manager of both parties yet rules in the old-time satrapic splendor of Jacksonian days. They had pledged the fealty of the hungry Egyptians by dazzling promises of patronage. So, after the Cook county convention, the "moral effect" had its fullest sway. The home stronghold