If one went into politics to effect something--and Hennion could not imagine why one went into anything otherwise--the leadership of the organisation seemed to be the effective point. The city had a set of chartered machinery, ineffectually chartered to run itself; also certain subsets of unchartered machinery. It voted now and then which of the subsets should be allowed to slip on its belt. The manner in which the chartered machinery was run depended somewhat on the expedients that were needed to keep the unchartered machinery going. There must be dynamics and mechanics in all that machinery. To an engineer's criticism it seemed oddly complicated. There must be a big waste. But almost any machine, turning heat force into motion, wasted sixty per cent. Still these sets and subsets seemed loosely geared. It looked like an interesting problem in engineering, that had been met rather experimentally. As mechanics, it seemed to be all in an experimental stage. Hennion wondered if there were any text-books on the subject, and then pulled himself up with a protest.
What did politics want of an engineer and a business man? As an engineer and a business man, he had been asking something of politics, to be sure, but he had only asked it in the way of business. In his father's time politics had called for lawyers. Nowadays lawyers too were mainly a class of business men. If political machinery had any dynamic and mechanic laws, they must be original. Those who succeeded in running it seemed to succeed by a kind of amateur, hand-to-mouth common sense.
Wood had been an interesting man. After all, he might have been as important in his way as Henry Champney had been. If you were talking of the dynamics of politics, you were estimating men as forces.
The amount and direction were a good deal matters of guess. Wood had thought Hennion's father a better man for results than Champney.
Wood himself had been a man for results, with some impersonal ambitions for Port Argent. He had known it better than almost anyone else, more of its details and different aspects, from the wharves to Seton Avenue. Those who criticised him generally had seemed hampered by knowing less about the matter than he did. They fell back on principles, and called him corrupt, which meant that, if the unchartered machinery needed fuel, the chartered machinery was set to turning out some bit of legislation to suit those who furnished the fuel. Hennion thought the prosperity of Port Argent had always been a motive with Wood. Only it was a complicated motive, half private, hardly confessed.