Again there was silence. It was the silences that seemed to be saying the most.
“You had one term in Congress—that's the only thing you ever had. Then you did so much that they concentrated in your district and saw to it that you never got back. Julius Caesar couldn't have been elected again,” he laughed harshly.
“Father,” the boy went on, after a pause, “you asked me if I were honest. There are two kinds of honesty. The primitive kind—like yours—and then the kind you develop for yourself. Do I believe the things I'm going to say to-night? No—not now. But I'll believe them more after I've heard the applause I'm sure to get. I'll believe them still more after I've had my first case thrown to me by our railroad friends who own this State. More and more after I've said them over in campaigning next fall, and pretty soon I'll be so sure I believe them that I really will believe them—and that,” he concluded, flippantly, “is the new brand of American honesty. Why, any smart man can persuade himself he's not a hypocrite!”
“My God!” it wrenched from the man. “This? If you'd stolen money—killed a man—but hypocrisy, cant—the very thing I've fought hardest, hated most! You lived all your life with me to learn this?”
“I lived all my life with you to learn what pays, and what doesn't. I lived all my life with you to learn from failure the value of success.”
“I never was sure I was a failure until this hour.”
“Father! Can't you see—”
“Oh, don't talk to me!” cried the old man, rising, reaching out his fist as though he would strike him. “Son of mine sitting there telling me he is fixing up a brand of honesty for himself!”
The boy grew quieter as self-restraint left his father. “I mean that—just that,” he said at last. “Let a man either give or get. If he gives, let it be to the real thing. There are two Americas. The America of you dreamers—and then the real America. Yours is an idea—an idea quite as much as an ideal. I don't think you have the slightest comprehension of how far apart it is from the real America. The people who dream of it over in Europe are a great deal nearer it than you people who work for it here. Father, the spirit of this country flows in a strong, swift, resistless current. You never got into it at all. Your kind of idealists influence it about as much—about as much as red lights burned on the banks of the great river would influence the current of that river. You're not of it. You came here, throbbing with the love for America; and with your ideal America you've fought the real, and you've worked and you've believed and you've sacrificed. Father, what's the use? In this State, anyway, it's hopeless. It has been so through your lifetime; it will be through mine.”
The man sat looking at him. He felt that he should say something, but the words did not come—held back, perhaps, by a sense of their uselessness. It was not so much what Fred said as it was the look in his eyes as he said it. There was nothing impetuous or youthful about that look, nothing to be laughed at or argued away. He had always felt that Fred had a mind which saw things straight, saw them in their right relations, and at that moment he had no words to plead for what Fred called the America of the dreamers.