“I'll tell you what I'll do,” Mr. Mechlin said, “I'll get a special car, and you invite the Gunthers and Seldens to go with us, and we will make a pleasant party all together.”
“That is a good idea. I'll see Mrs. Gunther to-day, and we will appoint the day to start.”
And thus it came to pass that on the 9th of January our Californians were traveling in a palace car on their way to Washington, in company with the most elite of New York.
Messrs. Bob Gunther and Arthur Selden were of the party. They derived no pleasure in being so, but they followed Mercedes because they preferred the bitter sweet of being near her, in her presence, rather than to accept at once the bitter alone of a hopeless separation. They knew they must not hope, but still they hoped, for the reason alone that hope goes with man to the foot of the gallows.
CHAPTER XX.—At the Capitol.
“There is no greater monster in being than a very ill man of great parts, he lives like a man in a palsy, with one side of him dead; while perhaps he enjoys the satisfaction of luxury, of wealth, of ambition, he has lost all the taste of good-will, of friendship, of innocence,” says Addison.
If this can be said of a man whose influence is of limited scope, how much more horrible the “palsy,” the moral stagnation, of the man whose power for good or evil extends to millions of people, to unlimited time; whose influence shall be felt, and shall be shaping the destinies of unborn generations, after he shall be only a ghastly skeleton, a bundle of crumbling bones!
Would that the power, the wisdom, the omniscience of God had not been repudiated, discarded, abolished, by modern thinkers, so that now but few feel any moral checks or dread of responsibility; for if there is to be no final accounting, morality ceases to be a factor, there being no fear of any hereafter; and as a natural sequence, there is no remedy left for the terrible “palsy.” For it is a well demonstrated fact that sense of justice, or pure philanthropy, alone, is but frail reliance. Fatally has man elevated his vanity to be his deity, with egotism for the high priest, and the sole aim and object of life the accumulation of money, with no thought of the never-ending to-morrow, the awakening on the limitless shore! no thought of his fellow-beings here, of himself in the hereafter!
“It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought,” says Carlyle, “for every individual man, that his earthly influence, which has had a commencement, will never, through all ages—were he the very meanest of us—have an end! What is done, is done; has already blended itself with the boundless, ever-living, ever-working universe, and will also work for good or for evil, openly or secretly, throughout all time. The life of every man is as a well-spring of a stream, whose small beginnings are indeed plain to all, but whose ulterior course and destination, as it winds through the expanses of infinite years, only the Omniscient can discern. Will it mingle with neighboring rivulets as a tributary, or receive them as their sovereign? Is it to be a nameless brook, and with its tiny waters, among millions of other brooks and rills, increase the current of some world's river? or is it to be itself a Rhine or a Danube, whose goings forth are to the uttermost lands, its floods an everlasting boundary-line on the globe itself, the bulwark and highway of whole kingdoms and continents? We know not, only, in either case, we know its path is to the great ocean; its waters, were they but a handful, are here, and cannot be annihilated or permanently held back.”
But how many of the influential of the earth think thus? If only the law-givers could be made to reflect more seriously, more conscientiously, upon the effect that their legislation must have on the lives, the destinies, of their fellow-beings forever, there would be much less misery and heart-rending wretchedness in this vale of tears. Now, the law-giver is a politician, who generally thinks more of his own political standing with other politicians than of the interests entrusted to his care. To speak of constituents sounds well, but who are the constituents? The men who govern them, who control votes, those who guide the majorities to the polls; the politicians, who make and unmake each other, they are the power—the rest of the people dream that they are—that's all. And if these law-givers see fit to sell themselves for money, what then? Who has the power to undo what is done? Not their constituents, surely. But the constituencies will be the sufferers, and feel all the effect of pernicious legislation.