Being of such mind, he was naturally sympathetic to the fervent and altruistic radicalism of Senator Embree. Almost before he knew it, he was committed to the broad, general policies of a new faction whose immediate object was to capture the party machinery and elect Embree Governor. Farmers, the more thoughtful class of labor in the industrial centers, and that floating vote which is always restless of party control, made up the bulk of “Smiling Mart’s” support. His newspaper backing was scanty. In Bellair, the chief city of Centralia, The Journal lent its valuable support to most of his measures and to his general policies. A score of country journals were thick-and-thin adherents. The Guardian soon began to be classed with these for loyalty and with the Bellair Journal for weightiness, in support of the new movement.
Jeremy Robson’s spirited editorial attacks upon the controlled State administration were now establishing his paper as a gospel to the fermenting political elements, and had earned the indignant distrust of those interests which base loud claims to impregnable respectability upon the ground of returning reliable dividends to their stockholders. To these he was anathema; a “dangerous radical,” a “half-Socialist,” an “enemy of American institutions,” a “confessed demagogue,” and the like impressive and silly characterizations. The Guardian was quoted, confuted, and abused over the State. It had become a power.
While Jeremy and Andrew Galpin and their lesser aides were struggling with the various immediate and insistent problems of a newspaper’s existence and sustenance, and establishing their organ before the public as genuinely independent in thought and unhampered in the expression of it, political prestige, which is not acquired in a day by a newspaper any more than by an individual, steadily accrued to it. Jeremy Robson had owned The Guardian for a year before he fully realized his political responsibilities in that what was said editorially in his paper greatly mattered to some thousands of earnest and groping minds. Not only this. He himself mattered, individually, as controlling The Guardian. His visiting list became inconveniently large. People took to dropping in at the office to discuss, advise, approve, or object, particularly visitors from the outlying districts who deemed it an all-sufficient introduction to state that they were “friends of Mart Embree.” Whether through the direct procurement of that energetic campaigner or otherwise, Jeremy found that The Guardian was considered to be not only the representative but the proprietary organ of the new movement. Financially this was an important asset. Nevertheless, the editor disrelished it. Remembering A. M. Wymett’s disquisition, he heartily resented his newspaper’s being regarded as the horn to any one’s phonograph! Moreover, all these calls ate up time. But that paid for itself in widened acquaintance and a more sympathetic understanding of the people who, after all, made up the Commonwealth cf Centralia. He made friends readily with them. They liked him as soon as they adjusted themselves to the shock of his apparel which they deemed dudish.
The World-War was still more than a year distant, still but the dream of such pessimistic and flighty minds as A. M. Wymett’s, when politics began to boil again in Centralia, and in that steaming stew of policies, principles, pretenses, ambitions, and chicaneries there simmered, all unseen, one of the minor but far-spread schemes of the Teutonic war-lord’s propaganda. It came to Jeremy’s ears through a call from Magnus Laurens, already being talked of as opposition candidate to Martin Embree, and already the subject of frank rather than well-judged comment, in the pages of The Guardian, as representing franchise-holding control of government. The water-power magnate looked squarer, ruggeder, more determined and formidable even than on the occasion when Jeremy had first seen him grimly facing the ridicule of the German societies. He was nearer sixty than fifty and walked like a football captain, and the blue eyes under the severe brows, as they met Jeremy’s, were alert and hard. The editor rose to greet him, holding out his hand.
“I did n’t come here to shake your hand,” said Laurens quietly. “I came to tell you something.”
Jeremy sat down. “Tell ahead,” said he.
“You’ ve been using my name too freely in your paper.”
“You’re a public character.”
“My name is my own. I’m particular about it. I keep it clean. Your paper has coupled it up with names that are n’t clean.”
“Did I choose your political associates, Mr. Laurens?” said Jeremy keenly.