The Shepherd of the North

by Richard Aumerle Maher

THE ANSWER

The Committee on Franchises was in session in one of the committee rooms outside the chamber of the New York State Senate. It was not a routine session. A bill was before it, the purpose of which was virtually to dispossess some four or five hundred families of their homes in the counties of Hamilton, Tupper and Racquette. The bill did not say this. It cited the need of adequate transportation in that part of the State and proposed that the U. & M. Railroad should be granted the right of eminent domain over three thousand square miles of the region, in order to help the development of the country.

The committee was composed of five members, three of the majority party in the Senate and two of the minority. A political agent of the railroad who drew a salary from Racquette County as a judge had just finished presenting to the committee the reasons why the people of that part of the State were unanimous in the wish that the bill should become a law. He had drawn a pathetic picture of the condition of the farmers, so long deprived of the benefits of a railroad. He had 104 almost wept as he told of the rich loads of produce left to rot up there in the hills because the men who toiled to produce it had no means of bringing it down to the starving thousands of the cities. The scraggy rocks and thinly soiled farms of that region became in his picture vast reservoirs of cheap food, only waiting to be tapped by the beneficent railroad for the benefit of the world’s poor.

When the judge had finished, one minority member of the committee looked at his colleague, the other minority member, and winked. It was a grave and respectful wink. It meant that the committee was not often privileged to listen to quite such bare-faced effrontery. If the hearing had been a secret one they would not have listened to it. But the bill had already aroused a storm. So the leader of the majority had given orders that the hearing should be public.

So far not a word had been said as to the fact which underlay the motives of the bill. Iron had been found in workable quantities in those three thousand square miles of hill country. Not a word had been said about iron.

No one in the room had listened to the speech with any degree of interest. It was intended entirely for the consumption of the outside public. Even the reporters had sat listless and bored during its delivery. They had been furnished with advance copies of it and had already turned them 105 in to their papers. But with the naming of the next witness a stir of interest ran sharply around the room.

Bishop Joseph Winthrop of Alden rose from his place in the rear of the room and walked briskly forward to the chair reserved. A tall, spare figure of a man coming to his sixty years, his hair as white as the snow of his hills, with a large, firm mouth and the nose of a Puritan governor, he would have attracted attention under almost any circumstances.

Nathan Gorham, the chairman of the committee, had received his orders from the leader of the majority in the Senate that the bill should be reported back favourably to that body before night. He had anticipated no difficulty. The form of a public hearing had to be gone through with. It was the most effective way of disarming the suspicions that had been aroused as to the nature of the bill. The speech of the Racquette County Judge was the usual thing at public hearings. The chairman had expected that one or two self-advertising reformers of the opposition would come before the committee with time-honoured, stock diatribes against the rapacity and greed of railroads in general and this one in particular. Then he and his two majority colleagues would vote to report the bill favourably, while the two members of the minority would vote to report adversely. This, the chairman said, was about all a public 106 hearing ever amounted to. He had not counted on the coming of the Bishop of Alden.

“The committee would like to hear, sir,” began the chairman, as the Bishop took his place, “whom you represent in the matter of this bill.”

The reporters, scenting a welcome sensation in what had been a dull session of a dull committee, sat with poised pencils while the Bishop turned a look of quiet gravity upon the chairman and said: