One Man in His Time

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

Vetch's face lost suddenly its rigid gravity, as if he had suffered a rush of energy to the brain. His eyes became blue again, and as keen as the blade of a knife.

"I believe, and the people who are with me believe, that I can make something out of the muddle if I am given a chance," he replied. "Oh, I know that the reactionaries are in the saddle now—that they have been ever since they had the war as an excuse to mount! But I know also that you can no more drive out by law the spirit of liberalism from the American mind than you can drive out nature with a pitchfork. For a little while you may think you have got the better of it; but it will crop out in spite of you. Now, I am a part of returning nature, of the inevitable rebound toward the spirit of liberalism. In the thought of the people who voted for me, I stand for the indestructible common sense of the American mind. I am one of the first signs of the new times."

"And you believe that you prove this," asked Stephen frankly, "by turning over your power of appointment to a group of self-interested politicians? You show your ability to govern by evading the first requirement of good government—that there should be honest and able men in control of public offices?"

A flicker came and went in the blue eyes. "I told you the other day," answered Vetch in a low voice, "that I used the tools at my command, and I tell you now that I am sometimes forced to use rotten ones. People say that I am an opportunist; but who has ever discovered any other policy that deals with life so completely? They say also that I am without public conscience—another name for opinions that have crystallized into prejudices. The truth is that the end for which I work seems to me vastly more important than the methods I use or the instruments that I employ."

It was the familiar chicanery of the popular leader, the justification of expediency, that Stephen had always found most repugnant as a political theory; and while he drew back, repelled and disgusted, he asked himself if the national conscience, the moral integrity of the race, was in the keeping of demagogues?

"I am curious to know," he remarked after a moment, "how you are able to justify the sacrifice of what I regard as common honesty in public affairs?"

To his surprise, instead of answering directly, Vetch put a personal question. "Then you think I am not honest? Darrow wouldn't agree with you."

At this Darrow turned from the window. "Perhaps he doesn't mean what we do," he said quietly. "I've seen honest men that I knew ought to have been in prison."

"I am speaking of course of the doctrines you advocate," answered Stephen. "That seems to me to be, in the jargon of the reformer, somewhat unethical. Can you, I question, achieve anything important enough to compensate for what you sacrifice?"

Darrow turned again with his dry laugh. "You speak as if public honesty, by which I reckon you mean clean elections and unsold offices, were something we had actually possessed," he said.