The reporters doubled down to their work and wrote furiously. They were trying to throw this unusual man upon a screen before their readers. It was not easy. He was an unmistakable product of New England, and what was more he had been one of the leaders of that collection of striking men who made the Brook Farm “Experiment.” He had endeared himself to the old generation of Americans by his war record as a chaplain. To some of the new generation he was known as the Yankee Bishop. But in the hill country, from the Mohawk Valley to the Canadian line and to Lake Champlain, he had one name, The Shepherd of the North. From Old Forge to Ausable to North Creek men knew his ways and felt the beating of the great heart of him behind the stern, ascetic set of his countenance.
As much as they could of this the reporters were trying to put into their notes while Nathan Gorham was recovering from his surprise. That well-trained statesman saw that he had let himself into a trap. He had been too zealous in announcing his impression that the opposition to the U. & M. Railroad was the work of a jealous rival. The Bishop had taken that ground from under him by a simple stroke of truth. He could neither go forward with his charge nor could he retract it.
“Would you be so kind, then, as to tell this committee,” he temporised, “just why you wished to arouse this opposition to the railroad?”
“There is not and has never been any opposition whatever to the railroad,” said the Bishop. “The bill before your committee has nothing to do with the right of way of the railroad. That has already been granted. Your bill proposes to confiscate, practically, from the present owners a strip of valuable land forty miles wide by nearly eighty miles long. That land is valuable because the experts of the railroad know, and the people up there know, and, I think, this committee knows that there is iron ore in these hills.
“I have said that I do not represent any one here,” the Bishop went on. “But there are four hundred families up there in our hills who stand to suffer by this bill. They are a silent people. They have no voice to reach the world. I have asked to speak before your committee because only in this way can the case of my people reach the great, final trial court of publicity before the whole State.
“They are a silent people, the people of the hills. You will have heard that they are a stubborn people. They are a stubborn people, for they cling to their rocky soil and to the hillside homes that their hands have made just as do the hardy trees of the hills. You cannot uproot them by the stroke of a pen.
“These people are my friends and my neighbours. Many of them were once my comrades. I know what they think. I know what they feel. I would beg your committee to consider very earnestly this question before bringing to bear against these people the sovereign power of the State. They love their State. Many of them have loved their country to the peril of their lives. They live on the little farms that their fathers literally hewed out of a resisting wilderness.
“Not through prejudice or ignorance are they opposing this development, which will in the end be for the good of the whole region. They are opposed to this bill before you because it would give a corporation power to drive them from the homes they love, and that without fair compensation.