Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/62



that offered any doubts on that point, and he offered them to me; he had none of his own. Pressed for facts, he admitted that Fagan was “personally on the square.” The bigger grafters said Fagan was a demagogue. This is ridiculous. He addresses no prejudices, stirs no passions, makes no appeal to class; he seems to have no sense of class. His talks, like his speeches, are so plain that the wonder is that they count as they do count, winning for him, a Republican, a majority in a Democratic city. I asked the politicians to explain it. Mark has a relative, Jimmy Connolly, once a saloon-keeper, always a hard-headed politician. When Mr. Record confessed he could not account for it he referred me to Jimmy Connolly, and I asked Connolly:

“How does Mark Fagan do it?”

“You can search me,” said he. “I’ve watched him, and I’ve listened to him, and I give it up. And you can ast anybody in this town; we’ve all ast ourselves and that is where you’ll end up. You’ll ast yourself. I don’t know what he says, and I’ve listened to him, but he doesn’t say nothing. Leastways, if you or the likes of me said to a fellar what Mark says, I can just hear the fellar say, ‘Say, what ye givin’ me, what?’ ‘Say,’ he’d say, ‘haven’t ye got th’ price of a drink in your clothes?’ But when Mark says it, what he says,