Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/109



of their business, they were corrupting all of us. Hadn’t they nearly corrupted me?”

The question was what to do. Colby didn’t know what to do. He asked me what I would have done, and I pass it on to you who read this: What would you have done ? And I ask the question to bring home to you the quandary of this young legislator and of his friends, and of the citizens of Orange and of Newark and of Jersey who wanted to fight. Lentz said Colby should not be renominated for the Assembly, and some of his friends proposed a fight in the party for the county committee. But Colby didn’t want to run for boss of Essex; he wanted to make his appeal more to the people. This was an instinct, a democratic instinct which this rich railroad magnate’s son has well developed in him. He proposed running an older man for senator, but the older man wouldn’t run and the Newark, Bloomfield, and Orange men wanted Colby to lead their common fight. He was in doubt. He wanted to make the fight impersonal, and they adopted his principle to fight the boss, not Lentz; not the man, but the boss as an institution, as an agent of a corrupt oligarchy. But how?

Then, said Colby, as he told me the story, “then came Record.”

There’s a good deal of feeling against George