From Shevlin’s rooters came a volley of hisses and cat-calls, but the disturbance and the disturbers were speedily squelched. From the galleries and from the back of the stage, where many prominent townsfolk sat, there sprang up a roll of protest, so menacing in its tone, that the half-drunken thugs’ cheer-leaders deemed it the better part of valor to draw into their shells and remain thereafter mute.
“My friends,” repeated Standish, his powerful voice echoing from floor to roof, “Abraham Lincoln freed the black men forty odd years ago. It’s time that somebody freed the white brother. For years this State has groaned under the tribute of a relentless Machine, under the rule of a railroad that was all stomach and no conscience, all bowels and no heart, all greed and no generosity. Our party—and with shame I say it—has been turned into a vest-pocket asset of this vile corporation. For months past, and more especially to-day, you have seen what its power is, as opposed to the power of the more honest citizens of our party. It won to-day, it won yesterday, and it won the day before. It always has won. It rests with us here to-day, now and in this hour, to decide whether a new Proclamation of Emancipation is to be issued or whether the great Democratic party in the Mountain State shall continue to be the chattel, the credulous, simple, weak-kneed, backboneless, hopeless, helpless victim of the greediest, most corrupt railroad that ever trailed its steel shackles across the face of the earth. Whether or not the Boss-guided Machine shall beat us to earth and hold us there forever. We have tried reforming the party from the inside, and we have failed. Has the time come to reform it from the outside?”
He paused, and the answer came. From the Conover hosts went up a shout of “No! No!” mingled with hiss and groan. But instantly, from a great scattered mass of the audience, and from the Standish delegates on the floor, there arose an outburst of cheering that drowned the barking negatives of what had been but ten short minutes before a majority of that convention.
The effect of this outburst was diverse on its hearers. With Standish himself it acted as a tonic, as an electric battery which gave him added force and vigor for what he had yet to say. Karl Ansel it seemed for the moment to stupify and paralyze. Conover’s lieutenants it threw into a state of consternation, which approached frenzy, panic, demoralization. They ran aimlessly to and fro, conferring excitedly in hoarse whispers.
Conover, alone, from his den at the rear of the stage, smiled to himself and gave no other sign of interest.
Standish was speaking again, and now behind him stood Karl Ansel recovering from his amazement, and intent to catch his leader’s every word.
“I tell you,” thundered Clive, beside himself with excitement, “we have got to act—and to act now. I tell you that the people of this State, irrespective of party, are waiting for half a chance to throw off the yoke of the railroad—of the Machine. All over this country of ours bosses are being overthrown. They are going down to ruin in the wreckage of their own Machines; and it is the PEOPLE who are downing them. The day of Bossism is passing—passing forever. We came into this convention as free men. Some of us did. And I for one propose to walk out of it a free man. If we go before the people of this State on the issue of honest government as opposed to dishonesty, I tell you that we will win. It only needs a man with a match, and the nerve to use that match, to start a conflagration that will burn party ties to cinders and leave a free, emancipated people.
“Let them call me bolter, if they will! Let them call me traitor, ingrate, renegade! I would rather be a bolter than a thief. I would rather rip my party, dearly as I love it, to rags and tatters, than to sacrifice my own self-respect any longer! I would rather see the Democratic party pass from existence altogether than to see it continue the tool and the creature of greed and dishonesty.
“Yes, they may call me bolter, and properly so, for I am going to bolt this convention! Is there a man who will follow me out of doors? Out of the filthy atmosphere of this Machine-ridden, Boss-owned convention, into the pure sunshine of God’s own people?”
In the midst of an indescribable tumult, in which hisses and cheers were madly intermingled, Clive Standish leaped off the platform, cleared the orchestra railing and strode up the middle aisle toward the open door at the far end of the hall.