208 POLITICAL LIFE-X 



made. Had it been a question simply between men, great 

 numbers of us who voted for Mr. Elaine would have voted 

 for Mr. Cleveland; but whatever temptation I might be 

 subjected to in the matter was overcome by one fact: Mr. 

 Cleveland was too much like the Trojan horse, for he bore 

 with him a number of men who, when once brought into 

 power, were sure to labor hard to undo everything that 

 he would endeavor to accomplish, and his predestined suc 

 cessor in the governorship of the State of New York was 

 one of those whom I looked upon as especially dangerous. 



Therefore it was, that, after looking over the ground, I 

 wrote an open letter to Mr. Theodore Roosevelt and other 

 Independents, giving the reasons why those of us who had 

 supported Mr. Edmunds should now support Mr. Elaine, 

 and in this view Mr. Roosevelt, with a large number of our 

 Independent friends, agreed. 



I had, however, small hopes. It was clear to me that Mr. 

 Elaine had little chance of being elected; that, in fact, he 

 was too heavily weighted with the transactions which Mr. 

 Pullman had revealed to me some months before the be 

 ginning of the convention. 



But I made an effort to commit him to the only policy 

 which could save him. For, having returned to the univer 

 sity, I wrote William Walter Phelps, an old friend, who 

 had been his chief representative at Chicago, an earnest 

 letter stating that there seemed to me but one chance of 

 rallying to Mr. Elaine s support the very considerable 

 body of disaffected Republicans in the State of New York ; 

 that, almost without exception, they were ardent believers 

 in a reform of the civil service ; and that an out-and-out 

 earnest declaration in favor of it by our presidential can 

 didate might do much to propitiate them. I reminded 

 Mr. Phelps of the unquestioned evils of the &quot;spoils sys 

 tem,&quot; and said that Mr. Elaine must surely have often 

 observed them, suffered under pressure from them, and 

 felt that something should be done to remedy them ; and 

 that if he would now express his conviction to this effect, 

 taking strong ground in favor of the reform and basing 



