One does not in person chase and catch and kill and dress and serve the chicken he has for dinner; he orders chicken, and hears and thinks no more about it until it is served. Thus, all the highly disagreeable part of my political work was done by others; Woodruff, admirably capable and most careful to spare my feelings, received the demands of my clients from their lawyers and transmitted them to the party leaders in the legislature with the instructions how the machinery was to be used in making them into law. As I was financing the machines of both parties, his task was not difficult, though delicate.
But now that I began to look over Woodruff's legislative program in advance, I was amazed at the rapacity of my clients, rapacious though I knew them to be. I had been thinking that the independent newspapers—there were a few such, but of small circulation and influence—were malignant in their attacks upon my "friends." In fact, as I soon saw, they had told only a small part of the truth. They had not found out the worst things that were done; nor had they grasped how little the legislature and the governor were doing other than the business of the big corporations, most of it of doubtful public benefit, to speak temperately. An hour's study of the facts and I realized as never before why we are so rapidly developing a breed of multi-millionaires in this country with all the opportunities to wealth in their hands. I had only to remember that the system which ruled my own state was in full blast in every one of the states of the Union. Everywhere, no sooner do the people open or propose to open a new road into a source of wealth, than men like these clients of mine hurry to the politicians and buy the rights to set up toll-gates and to fix their own schedule of tolls.
However, the time had now come when I must assert myself. I made no radical changes in that first program of Burbank's term. I contented myself with cutting off the worst items, those it would have ruined Burbank to indorse. My clients were soon grumbling, but Woodruff handled them well, placating them with excuses that soothed their annoyance to discontented silence. So ably did he manage it that not until Burbank's third year did they begin to come directly to me and complain of the way they were being "thrown down" at the capitol.
Roebuck, knowing me most intimately and feeling that he was my author and protector, was frankly insistent. "We got almost nothing at the last session," he protested, "and this winter—Woodruff tells me we may not get the only thing we're asking."
I was ready for him, as I was for each of the ten. I took out the list of measures passed or killed at the last session in the interest of the Power Trust. It contained seventy-eight items, thirty-four of them passed. I handed it to him.
"Yes,—a few things," he admitted, "but all trifles!"
"That little amendment to the Waterways law must alone have netted you three or four millions already."
"Nothing like that. Nothing like that."
"I can organize a company within twenty-four hours that will pay you four millions in cash for the right, and stock besides."
He did not take up my offer.