Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

I knew this young civilian then only as one of the Johnson group and as that was sufficient introduction, in the camaraderie that existed between those of us who were devoted to the same cause, I stopped, at his salutation, and chatted with him for a moment. He had asked my opinion on a bill he had introduced, a measure to prohibit or regulate public dances in cities, or some such thing, and when I failed to evince the due degree of interest in the young man’s measure, he was at once displeased and tried to heat me to the proper degree of warmth in the holy cause of reform. He began, of course, by an indignant demand to know if I was in favor of the evils that were connected with public dances, and when I tried to show him that my inability to recognize his measure as the only adequate method of dealing with those evils did not necessarily indicate approval of them, he struck the prescribed attitude, held up his right hand and said something in the melodramatic style, about the oath of office I had taken not many days before. I saw at once then that I was dealing with a member in high standing of the order of the indurated sectarian mind, whose fanaticism makes them the most impossible persons in the world, and having never been certain which of the advice in the Proverbs should be accepted, I yielded to a fatal habit of joking—the history of the Republic is strewn with the wrecks of careers that were broken by a jest—and told him that I had taken my oath of office before a notary public, and that perhaps it had not been of full efficacy on that account.

And then I went away, and forgot the incident. It was revived in my memory, however, and intensified in its interest for me the next morning, when on getting back home, I saw in the newspapers a despatch from Columbus, under the most ominous of black headlines, stating that I had told the distinguished representative, on the very floor of the House, under the aegis, one almost might say, of the state, that I had no reverence for my oath of office, and did not intend to respect it. Here was anarchy for you, indeed, from the old pupil of Altgeld!

It was, of course, useless to explain, since any statement I might make would be but one more welcome knot to the tangle of misrepresentation in which the unhappy incident was being so gladly snarled, and I tried to forget it, though that was impossible, since it provided the text for many a sanctimonious editorial in the land, in each one of which some addition was made to the original report. Herbert Spencer says somewhere that for every story told in the world there is some basis of truth, and I suppose he is right, but I have always felt that he did not, at least in my reading of him, sufficiently characterize that worst vice of the human mind, intellectual dishonesty. Perhaps if he had associated less with scientists and more with professional reformers of the morals of other persons he would not have omitted this curious specimen from his philosophic analysis, if he did omit it; and if that experience of the young civilian at Columbus had not been sufficient, I could have supplied him with another out of an episode in which I had borne a part some years before, one which should have been sufficient to warn me against the type for the rest of my life.

It concerns another young civilian, though this one was so old that he should have known better, and relates to a time years before when I happened to be running for the state senate. I say happened, for it was precisely of that fortuitous nature, since I had not been concerned in the circumstances which nominated me, so entirely negative in their character that I might as well have been said not to be running at all. I was a young lawyer, just beginning to practice, and in my wide leisure was out of town that summer, economically spending a holiday at my father’s house, and, since the Democrats had no hope in this world of carrying the district, and could get no one who was on the ground to defend himself to accept their nomination, they had nominated me. It was an honor, perhaps, but so empty and futile that when I came home again it seemed useless even to decline it, and best to forget it, and so I tried to do that, and made no campaign at all. But one afternoon I had a caller, a tall, dark visaged man, in black clerical garb, who came softly into my office, carefully closed the door, and, fixing his strange, intense eyes on me, said that he came to talk politics. He represented a reform league and he came, he said, to discuss my candidature for the state senate, and to offer me the support of his organization. “Of course,” he went on to explain, “we should impose certain conditions.” He fixed on me again and very intently, those strange, fanatic eyes.

I knew very well what the conditions were; it was hardly necessary for him to explain that I should be expected to sign a pledge to support the bills proposed by his organization, some of which, no doubt, were excellent measures.

I explained to him that I was under no illusions as to the campaign, that there was no possible chance of my election that year, that if there had been I never would have been nominated, and nothing short of a miracle could elect me. “But,” I added, “even if that miracle happens, though it will not, and I should be elected, I should go down to Columbus and to the Senate able to say that I had made no promises whatever.”

He looked at me a moment, with those strange, cold eyes peering narrowly out of his somber visage, and as he gazed they seemed to contract, and with the faint shadow of a smile that was wholly without humor, he said:

“Well, you can say that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

The smile raised the man’s cheeks a little higher until they enclosed the little eyes in minute wrinkles, and invested them with an expression of the deepest cunning.