Luke was too much occupied by the political campaign not to acknowledge that, weak or strong, Forbes must be left in control of the firm. The battle for votes was four-cornered without being square; it was hot and bitter. On the issue of the district-attorneyship, the Democrats and Progressives were helping Leighton and the Republicans by directing all their energies against Luke and the Municipal Reform League. They raised high the accusation of demagogism and appealed to business large and small to rescue credit from the hurts that Huber threatened. Leighton, supported by the full strength of his organization, was pretending that Luke's disaffection was that of a discharged servant; the District-Attorney pleaded for a safe and sane conduct of the office of the public prosecutor.
Although the League's lesser workers undertook the task of canvassing the city, treating with politicians and employers, advertising, arguing, pleading, promising, and threatening, doing all the mysterious multitude of things that are necessary to practical politics; although, too, the other candidates and the volunteer and hired speakers performed heavy shares of the speech-making from cart-ends and stages, on street and in hall, Luke was constantly being called on to help his associates and had more than enough in his own department to keep him busy from the time when he got out of bed of a morning until, often the next morning, he got in again.
By telegraph, telephone, motor-car, and messenger, he had to be in perpetual touch with every election-precinct in the city and with every important Leaguer in every precinct. He had to answer hundreds of letters, see hundreds of callers, give out scores of interviews, compose and deliver from three to a dozen speeches a day to as many different sorts of audiences. There was nothing considered too small to merit his attention, nothing too large to be beyond his watchfulness. Once every day he was in each quarter of New York, and he was nowhere for more than half an hour at a time.
Only his elaborately acquired calm and his inherited strength of constitution saved him from nervous breakdown. Except for them, his burning sincerity, his zeal, and the endless calls made upon these characteristics, would have driven him to a hospital. Even so, his body grew leaner and his face deeply lined. He was fighting with every ounce of muscle and every particle of brain.
For now, as in every alley and at every turning, his political progress revealed some new though ever partial phase of the power he attacked, Luke saw all that he hated centered in one figure, originated by one mind. He individualized Evil. That entire meshwork of wrong which he was trying to tear into shreds, he traced directly to the plump, pale man in russet brown, the malignant thing with the hairy hands and beady eyes, the creature that he had once seen crouched at the end of a mahogany table in a Wall Street skyscraper, from the windows of which the maze of streets resembled the strands of a web with men and women struggling on them like entangled flies.
Of all the fine and fatal threads that were snaring alike the helpless and the strong, what threads were not spun by him? Of all the corruption that was poisoning the country and infecting the ideals of the Republic, what was there that did not proceed from his fangs? Luke seemed to see it all now—was certain that he saw it—with awful clarity. The Rollins letters, the interview in Wall Street, the action of the banks, and Osserman's hint from the City Chamberlain, the part played by the street-girl, the raid by the police, the talks with Stein and the daily partial liftings of the political curtain: these, reviewed in the lurid glow of the campaign, confirmed the accumulated gossip of years, corroborated every wild story that came to him on the teeming battlefield: of bribery and thieving, of perjury and murder, of all the crimes that men have known, each committed again and again and again—safely committed in the dark, cravenly done under the protection of bought-and-paid-for law.
What mattered now this power's culture? What mattered its benefactions, its colleges for the ignorant, its hospitals for the ill? As Luke saw them now, these were only dust for the eyes of the public, cheap peace-offerings for intricate wrongs. The good could be counted on the fingers of the hand, the evil was as the sands of the sea.
It was everywhere. It mocked religion, because It supported churches; It debauched Government, because It governed the governors; It destroyed Law, because It controlled the Law's administrators. It was master of the means of production and distribution; It owned the storehouses of wealth; the clothes upon the backs of the people, the houses that they lived in; the meat on the tables of the rich, the bread in the bellies of the poor. It secured Its own prices for them, and withheld them as It chose. Directly or indirectly, the whole nation took Its wages—such wages as It chose to pay.
At the great League meeting in Cooper Union, Luke, fronting a wilderness of faces, shouted his defiance of this Power. He said no name, but none that heard him could doubt whom he meant. For that night, Luke Huber's friends no longer knew the languid young lawyer in this shouting, quivering, torch-bearing evangel on the historic Cooper Union Stage. The boy had died that, bound for New York, thought himself as a Templar entering Jerusalem, but from his ashes there rose a new Peter the Hermit preaching a new crusade.
"If we had the eyes to see," he said, "we'd know that from this city, the center of our civilization, slender threads, so numerous as to be beyond our counting, run out to every corner of the land. Slender threads: the merest gossamer, but so tough that, once entangled in them, no man escapes. No man, no woman, and no child. The delicate filaments catch and hold us by the thousand every day. They catch us at our birth and they hold us till our death: life-prisoners even when we are unaware of it, more desperately prisoners when we are unaware of it. The good and the bad and the hopelessly neither-good-nor-bad; efficient and inefficient, every sort and condition, men and boys, women and girls—the net has use for us all: for the labor of the child, the body of the woman, the hand or the brain, the money or the muscles, of the man. It has uses for our virtues and more use for our vices. All are needed, none that is caught goes free. If we had the eyes to see, we should see it; but the strands are as fine as they are tough, and only when a victim has so much blood in him that his dying struggles ensanguine the thread that holds him do we, noting his blood, note what has received his blood—and even there, we rarely consider that thread in relation to its fellows, hardly ever realize that it is part of a plan, hardly ever trace it to its center."