She wept at that, saying that he misconstrued her warm sympathy with the unfortunate; and he, proof against anything but the feminine tear-gland, as she knew, protested his faith. It was near his lips at this moment to beg her to treat Ludlow henceforth with mere civility, but he refrained. When he broached it afterward her pliant mood had vanished.
"You would have Albany saying that you believe its tittle-tattle," she argued; and he deferred for the hundredth time to her superior perception of the mental processes of the social world.
Till the Legislature met in January, the governor was absorbed in the writing of his annual message, whose recommendations he proposed to devote almost exclusively to the canals. His committee had completed its work, and his great plan was muscular and vertebrate in all its structure, for he contemplated a far-reaching system of legislation rather than a simple makeshift appropriation of the out-worn type; and the ultimate goal of it all was to lift the politics-ridden waterway out of politics altogether. Before he gave his final revision to the printers, he submitted a proof to the Boss, who returned it with the comment that his intellect was of an order quite too everyday to criticise a project obviously framed for the millennium. From the man reputed to own the Legislature, whose committees, certainly, were cut and dried in his office weeks before it met, this sarcasm was gloomily prophetic; but since his Tuscarora speech, Shelby had personally sounded many senators, assemblymen, and representatives of the several canal interests, and he was not dismayed.
The reception given by the newspapers to what they styled "The Governor's Splendid Dream" heartened Shelby, though he deprecated its form. He insisted that the scheme was no more his than the committee's, whose elaborate report he submitted with his message, and that it was no dream at all, but the businesslike remedy for an admitted ill. As in De Witt Clinton's case, however, the public brushed aside the idle question of genesis, and honored the untiring advocate.
There were plenty who agreed with the governor. Famous economic experts and civil service reformers wrote their approval, great financiers wired congratulations, and the public hearings on the bills embodying his ideas, which friendly legislators shortly introduced, were attended by representatives from the exchanges, boards of trade, merchants' associations, and chambers of commerce of every city directly concerned.
A reporter remarked upon this striking showing to the Boss.
"Yes," said the great man, "the governor seems to have the unanimous support of the college professors and the New Yorkers who claim residence in Newport, Rhode Island; but I wonder what the taxpayer thinks."
This figurative taxpayer personified for him the rural vote whose strength was his strength, and whose thought he made his own. He was hearkening to the murmur of the counties which the canal did not touch, but whose memory of its flagrant abuses was long, and the conclusion that he reached the country newspapers of his system began speedily to express. One editor bewailed the "Hundred-Million-Dollar-Millstone" which the governor proposed to hang about the people's neck; another attacked the consistency of the man who would to-day scatter like a prodigal what he had scrimped yesterday to save; while a third pertinently inquired whether such a spendthrift were fit timber to put in Washington as a check upon the waxing extravagance of Congress? By dint of repetition these things attained wide currency.
Shelby was untroubled.
"Millions, to be sure," he replied to a query of his wife's. "The commercial supremacy of a state is perforce a question of millions."