Note 324 — Chapter XXI · The San Francisco Election of 1907.

The Examiner, in its issue of September 19, 1907, in discussing Mr. Ryan’s proposed candidacy said: “It is generally understood that Mr. Dan Ryan proposes to nominate himself as the Republican candidate for Mayor of San Francisco. That he has the power to do this thing is one of the curiosities of our political system.

“The theory is that the delegates to a convention represent that part of the public which marches under the political banner of a political party. But Mr. Ryan evidently considers that the delegates to the Republican convention were chosen to advance his personal political ambitions.

“The people do not mean that the accidental leaders of a primary fight should put the offices in their own pockets.

“They elect delegates as agents to select candidates from among the people. The delegates are the bearers of a trust and neither they nor the man who happens to captain them in the scramble between factions has a right to appropriate the nominations.

“The trust is not fulfilled if the primary leader assumes that because the people elected his primary ticket they want him in office. They don’t want him, for they don’t want primary politicians in the Mayor’s chair.

“The theory of any convention is that it is assembled to choose the best man in the party for its candidate. The spectacle of Mr. Dan Ryan holding a caucus with himself, and deciding that he is better qualified to be Mayor of San Francisco than any other man in the Republican party, is a grotesque piece of effrontery.

“All sorts of men rise to the top in primary fights, but most of them have a sufficient sense of modesty, if not of the fitness of things, to abstain from making themselves the recipients of what the delegates have to give.

“For the primary leader to appropriate the office to himself Is like the agent of a charity fund determining that he is the most worthy object of the charity and putting the money in his own pocket.”