“You see,” he said, “I’ve lived different. When a man has been born and brought up among the mountains and lived a country life among folks that are all neighbours and have neighbourly ways, city life strikes him hard. Politics look different here; they are different. They’re not of the neighbourly kind. Politicians ain’t joking each other and having a good time. They don’t know anything about the other man, and they don’t care a damn. What’s Hamlin County to them? Why, they don’t know anything about Hamlin County, and, as far as I’ve got, they don’t want to. They’ve got their own precincts to attend to, and they’re going to do it. When a new man comes in, if he ain’t a pretty big fellow that knows how to engineer things and say things to make them listen to him, he’s only another greenhorn. Now, I’m not a big fellow, Tom; I’ve found that out! and the first two months after I came, blamed if I wasn’t so homesick and discouraged that if it hadn’t been for seeming to go back on the boys, durned if I don’t believe I should have gone home.”
Big Tom sat and regarded his honest face thoughtfully.
“Perhaps you’re a bigger man than you know,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll find that out in time, and perhaps other people will.”
The Judge shook his head.
“I’ve not got education enough,” he said. “And I’m not an orator. All there is to me is that I’m not going back on the boys and Hamlin. I came here to do the square thing by them and the United States, and blamed if I ain’t going to do it as well as I know how.”
“Now, look here,” said Big Tom, “that’s pretty good politics to start with. If every man that came here came to stand by his party—and the United States—and do the square thing by them, the republic would be pretty safe, if they couldn’t do another durned thing.”
The Judge rubbed his already rather rough head and seemed to cheer up a little.
“Do you think so?” he said.
Big Tom stood up and gave him a slap on his shoulder.
“Think so?” he exclaimed, in his great, cheerful voice. “I’m a greenhorn myself, but, good Lord! I know it. Making laws for a few million people is a pretty big scheme, and it’s the fellows who intend to do the square thing who are going to put it through. This isn’t ancient Greece, or Sparta, but it’s my impression that the men who planned and wrote the Constitution, and did the thinking and orating in those days, had a sort of idea of building up a thing just as ornamental and good to write history about as either one; and, what’s more, they counted on just such fellows as you to go on carrying the stones and laying them plumb, long after they were gone.”