It will be precisely so when the people resume control of their own government.  The men who conduct the political machines are a small fraction of the party they pretend to represent, and the men who exercise corrupt influences upon them are only a small fraction of the business men of the country.  What we are banded together to fight is not a party, is not a great body of citizens; we have to fight only little coteries, groups of men here and there, a few men, who subsist by deceiving us and cannot subsist a moment after they cease to deceive us.

I had occasion to test the power of such a group in the State of New Jersey, and I had the satisfaction of discovering that I had been right in supposing that they did not possess any power at all.  It looked as if they were entrenched in a fortress; it looked as if the embrasures of the fortress showed the muzzles of guns; but, as I told my good fellow-citizens, all they had to do was to press a little upon it and they would find that the fortress was a mere cardboard fabric; that it was a piece of stage property; that just so soon as the audience got ready to look behind the scenes they would learn that the army which had been marching and counter-marching in such terrifying array consisted of a single company that had gone in one wing and around and out at the other wing, and could have thus marched in procession for twenty-four hours.  You only need about twenty-four men to do the trick.  These men are impostors.  They are powerful only in proportion as we are susceptible to absurd fear of them.  Their capital is our ignorance and our credulity.

To-day we are seeing something that some of us have waited all of our lives to see.  We are witnessing a rising of the country.  We are seeing a whole people stand up and decline any longer to be imposed upon.  The day has come when men are saying to each other:  “It doesn’t make a peppercorn’s difference to me what party I have voted with.  I am going to pick out the men I want and the policies I want, and let the label take care of itself.  I do not find any great difference between my table of contents and the table of contents of those who have voted with the other party, and who, like me, are very much dissatisfied with the way in which their party has rewarded their faithfulness.  They want the same things that I want, and I don’t know of anything under God’s heaven to prevent our getting together.  We want the same things, we have the same faith in the old traditions of the American people, and we have made up our minds that we are going to have now at last the reality instead of the shadow.”

We Americans have been too long satisfied with merely going through the motions of government.  We have been having a mock game.  We have been going to the polls and saying:  “This is the act of a sovereign people, but we won’t be the sovereign yet; we will postpone that; we will wait until another time.  The managers are still shifting the scenes; we are not ready for the real thing yet.”