happened
to meet about noon that day the chairman of the committee which had the Bloomfield bill in charge, and they went together to lunch. When they entered the restaurant there sat the Majot with his citizens. The boss seemed gradually to work himself into a rage, for after staring angrily at Colby a few moments, he got up, stalked over, and “putting his head in between ours,” Colby says, “ and spluttering in my face, he demanded to know if I was opposing him in this. So far as Colby can recall, he and the chairman hadn’t mentioned the bill, but he was opposing Lentz
“in this,” and he said so.
“That settles it,” said the Major.
Not only “that,” but everything settled it between Colby and his boss and the bosses of the boss. Tom McCarter had said Colby would lose every friend he had in Essex; Uzel had warned him to take heed for his political future. It was fight,” says Colby now. “I went home from that session burning hot with indignation. But I didn’t think about my political future. That had sunk into a small detail of a situation which was bigger than the political ambition of any man. I saw that the legislature, yes, and the government in nearly all of its branches, was ruled absolutely by our Jersey corporations. And despotically, unscrupulously, too; in the interest
