“Oh, I am not entirely without acquaintance in this white-winged profession of yours,” replied the lawyer, smilingly. “I know Mr. Mortimer Samboye, for example. I could tell you too, you confiding youngster, just his figure, and where the cheque, made payable to his wife, was cashed.”
“If you do know about Samboye, you know what I believe to be the one exception to the rule in the State. I don’t for a moment believe that there is another editor whom your people could have bought. It is an odious exception, to be sure, but exceptions prove the rule. If journalists and journals were in the market, as you and your machine friends seem to imagine, there would be no such widespread bolt against your machine ticket to-day.”
“Oh, you think so, do you?”
The lawyer was getting vexed. He stood up, thrust his hands deep into his trowsers pockets, and spoke with more sharpness than before.
“You think so! Why, man alive, this same d——d Chronicle of yours has been in the market since before you were born. I bet you to-day that Workman would rather plank out five thousand dollars from his own pocket than let me cross-examine him in the witness box on his recollections of the Chronicle’s record. Why, that is the very last paper in the State that has a title to throw stones! Do you want to know when this new reforming zeal of Workman’s was born? I can tell you. It was the day that another man (Dick Folts, if you wish names), was appointed to the Territorial Governorship that Workman wanted for his brother. So you thought it was only high morality and noble patriotic sentiments that ailed the Chronicle, did you? You never suspected that it was simply a bad case of brother—that it all happened because Samuel M. Workman of Toboggan was compelled to continue to adorn a private station? You think the world is run on kid-gloved, scriptural ethics? It reminds me of a novel I read here awhile ago. It set out to describe An American Politician—and in almost every scene in the book where he appeared, he was drinking tea in some lady’s drawing room, declaiming to the fair sex on how he was going to reform politics. He thought he was a deuce of a fellow, and so did the women and the author too. This politician was a good sample of all your reformers. I tell you, the men who go to afternoon teas in America, exert no more influence on American politics than—than a hen who was too refined to scratch in the barn-yard for worms would exert on the question of female suffrage. Now don’t make a fool of yourself, Seth. Your predecessor, Samboye, was in no way your equal—some fellow at the club once, I remember, just hit him off in a phrase which he had hunted up in the dictionary to sling at him: ‘a nugipolyloquous numbskull ’—but he knew enough to feather his own nest, and to take men as they are, and not as the Prophet Jeremiah might think they ought to be. Don’t make me angry with this pharisaical nonsense! You are very young yet. You will see things differently when you have rubbed up against the world a while longer.”
Seth also stood up now, with his hands deep in his pockets—a trick of all the Fairchilds when they were excited.
“I have no desire to make you angry,” he answered, beginning with an effort at calmness, but soon raising his voice, “and I shouldn’t have dreamed of inflicting my juvenile views on you if you hadn’t insisted, even to the point of a threat, on my coming here. I would rather not argue the thing at all. We regard politics from totally different standpoints. I believe that your methods and aims—by ‘your’ I mean your wing of the party—are scandalous, corrupting and ruinous. I believe that if some check is not put upon the rule of the machine, if the drift of public acquiescence in debased processes of government is not stopped, it will soon be too late to save even the form of our institutions from the dry rot of venality.”
“Seems to me I’ve read all this. Don’t work your old leaders off on me. Talk sense!” said Albert.
Seth dropped rhetoric: “All this is very real, very big, to me. To you it is impracticable and meaningless. You don’t at all believe in the dangers which are so apparent to me. Perhaps if you did you wouldn’t care. That is all right. I have no desire to convert you, or to debate the question with you. I simply want to explain that there is no community of premises, even, between us on this subject. As for your explanation of the motives underlying the Chronicle’s attitude, I shan’t contradict you. So far as I am concerned, the matter is not in argument. It is enough for me that we bolt the State ticket, and occupy the ground we do. It is no concern of mine by what path we got there.”
Albert had heard his brother through with contemptuous impatience. He said now, with one foot on the stove hearth, and in a voice which, by its very coldness of calm, ought to have warned Seth of the temper underlying it: