Part 69

"Yet he's just the opposite of you. He's an idealist."

"Who told you that?" laughed Charlton. "He's the most practical, sensible man in this town. You people think he's a crank because he isn't crazy about money or about stepping round on the necks of his fellow beings. The truth is, he's got a sense of proportion--and a sense of humor--and an idea of a rational happy life. You're still barbarians, while he's a civilized man. Ever seen an ignorant yap jeer when a neat, clean, well-dressed person passed by? Well, you people jeering at Victor Dorn are like that yap."

"I agree with you," said Jane hastily and earnestly.

"No, you don't," replied Charlton, tossing away the end of his cigarette. "And so much the worse for you. Good-night, lady."

And away he strode into the darkness, leaving her amused, yet with a peculiar sense of her own insignificance.

Charlton was back again early the next morning and spent that day--and a large part of many days there-after--in working at the wreck, Martin Hastings, inspecting known weak spots, searching for unknown ones, patching here and there, trying all the schemes teeming in his ingenious and supremely sensible mind in the hope of setting the wreck afloat again. He could not comprehend why the old man remained alive. He had seen many a human being go who was in health, in comparison with this conglomerate of diseases and frailties; yet life there was, and a most tenacious life. He worked and watched, and from day to day put off suggesting that they telegraph for the son. The coming of his son might shake Martin's conviction that he would get well; it seemed to Charlton that that conviction was the one thread holding his patient from the abyss where darkness and silence reign supreme.

Jane could not leave the grounds. If she had she would have seen Victor Dorn either not at all or at a distance. For the campaign was now approaching its climax.

The public man is always two wholly different personalities. There is the man the public sees--and fancies it knows. There is the man known only to his intimates, known imperfectly to them, perhaps an unknown quantity even to himself until the necessity for decisive action reveals him to himself and to those in a position to see what he really did. Unfortunately, it is not the man the public sees but the hidden man who is elected to the office. Nothing could be falser than the old saw that sooner or later a man stands revealed. Sometimes, as we well know, history has not found out a man after a thousand years of studying him. And the most familiar, the most constantly observed men in public life often round out a long career without ever having aroused in the public more than a faint and formless suspicion as to the truth about them.

The chief reason for this is that, in studying a character, no one is content with the plain and easy way of reaching an understanding of it--the way of looking only at its ACTS. We all love to dabble in the metaphysical, to examine and weigh motives and intentions, to compare ourselves and make wildly erroneous judgment inevitable by listening to the man's WORDS--his professions, always more or less dishonest, though perhaps not always deliberately so.

In that Remsen City campaign the one party that could profit by the full and clear truth, and therefore was eager for the truth as to everything and everybody, was the Workingmen's League. The Kelly crowd, the House gang, the Citizens' Alliance, all had their ugly secrets, their secret intentions different from their public professions. All these were seeking office and power with a view to increasing or perpetuating or protecting various abuses, however ardently they might attack, might perhaps honestly intend to end, certain other and much smaller abuses. The Workingmen's League said that it would end every abuse existing law did not securely protect, and it meant what it said.

Its campaign fund was the dues paid in by its members and the profits from the New Day. Its financial books were open for free inspection. Not so the others--and that in itself was proof enough of sinister intentions.

Under Victor Dorn's shrewd direction, the League candidates published, each man in a sworn statement, a complete description of all the property owned by himself and by his wife. "The character of a man's property," said the New Day, "is an indication of how that man will act in public affairs. Therefore, every candidate for public trust owes it to the people to tell them just what his property interests are. The League candidates do this--and an effective answer the schedules make to the charge that the League's candidates are men who have 'no stake in the community.' Now, let Mr. Sawyer, Mr. Hull, Mr. Galland and the rest of the League's opponents do likewise. Let us read how many shares of water and ice stock Mr. Sawyer owns. Let us hear from Mr. Hull about his traction holdings--those of the Hull estate from which he draws his entire income. As for Mr. Galland, it would be easier for him to give the list of public and semi-public corporations in which he is not largely interested. But let him be specific, since he asks the people to trust him as judge between them and those corporations of which he is almost as large an owner as is his father-in-law."

This line of attack--and the publication of the largest contributors to the Republican and Democratic-Reform campaign fund--caused a great deal of public and private discussion. Large crowds cheered Hull when he, without doing the charges the honor of repeating them, denounced the "undignified and demagogic methods of our desperate opponents." The smaller Sawyer crowds applauded Sawyer when he waxed indignant over the attempts of those "socialists and anarchists, haters of this free country and spitters upon its glorious flag, to set poor against rich, to destroy our splendid American tradition of a free field and no favors, and let the best man win!"

Sawyer, and Davy, all the candidates of the machines and the reformers for that matter, made excellent public appearances. They discoursed eloquently about popular rights and wrongs. They denounced corruption; they stood strongly for the right and renounced and denounced the devil and all his works. They promised to do far more for the people than did the Leaguers; for Victor Dorn had trained his men to tell the exact truth--the difficulty of doing anything for the people at any near time or in any brief period because at a single election but a small part of the effective offices could be changed, and sweeping changes must be made before there could be sweeping benefits. "We'll do all we can," was their promise. "Their county government and their state government and their courts won't let us do much. But a beginning has to be made. Let's make it!"

David Hull's public appearance was especially good. Not so effective as it has now become, because he was only a novice at campaigning in that year. But he looked, well--handsome, yet not too handsome, upper class, but not arrogant, serious, frank and kindly. And he talked in a plain, honest way--you felt that no interest, however greedy, desperate and powerful, would dare approach that man with an improper proposal--and you quite forgot in real affairs the crude improper proposal is never the method of approach. When Davy, with grave emotion, referred to the "pitiful efforts to smirch the personal character of candidates," you could not but burn with scorn of the Victor Dorn tactics. What if Hull did own gas and water and ice and traction and railway stocks? Mustn't a rich man invest his money somehow? And how could he more creditably invest it than in local enterprises and in enterprises that opened up the country and gave employment to labor? What if the dividends were improperly, even criminally, earned? Must he therefore throw the dividends paid him into the street? As for a man of such associations and financial interests being unfit fairly to administer public affairs, what balderdash! Who could be more fit than this educated, high minded man, of large private means, willing to devote himself to the public service instead of drinking himself to death or doing nothing at all. You would have felt, as you looked at Davy and listened to him, that it was little short of marvelous that a man could be so self-sacrificing as to consent to run the gauntlet of low mudslingers for no reward but an office with a salary of three thousand a year. And you would have been afraid that, if something was not done to stop these mudslingers, such men as David Hull would abandon their patriotic efforts to save their country--and then WHAT would become of the country?

But Victor and his associates--on the platform, in the paper, in posters and dodgers and leaflets--continued to press home the ugly questions--and continued to call attention to the fact that, while there had been ample opportunity, none of the candidates had answered any of the questions. And presently--keeping up this line of attack--Victor opened out in another. He had Falconer, the League candidate for judge, draw up a careful statement of exactly what each public officer could do under existing law to end or to check the most flagrant of the abuses from which the people of Remsen City were suffering. With this statement as a basis, he formulated a series of questions--"Yes or no? If you are elected, will you or will you not?" The League candidates promptly gave the specific pledges. Sawyer dodged. David Hull was more adroit. He held up a copy of the list of questions at a big meeting in Odd Fellows' Hall.

"Our opponents have resorted to a familiar trick--the question and the pledge." (Applause. Sensation. Fear lest "our candidate" was about to "put his foot in it.") "We need resort to no tricks. I promptly and frankly, for our whole ticket, answer their questions. I say, 'We will lay hold of ANY and EVERY abuse, as soon as it presents itself, and WILL SMASH IT."

Applause, cheers, whistlings--a demonstration lasting nearly five minutes by a watch held by Gamaliel Tooker, who had a mania for gathering records of all kinds and who had voted for every Republican candidate for President since the party was founded. Davy did not again refer to Victor Dorn's questions. But Victor continued to press them and to ask whether a public officer ought not to go and present himself to abuses, instead of waiting for them to hunt him out and present themselves to him.

Such was the campaign as the public saw it. And such was in reality the campaign of the Leaguers. But the real campaign--the one conducted by Kelly and House--was entirely different. They were not talking; they were working.

They were working on a plan based somewhat after this fashion:

In former and happier days, when people left politics to politicians and minded their own business, about ninety-five per cent. of the voters voted their straight party tickets like good soldiers. Then politics was a high-class business, and politicians devoted themselves to getting out the full party vote and to buying or cajoling to one side or the other the doubtful ten per cent that held the balance of power. That golden age, however, had passed. People had gotten into the habit of fancying that, because certain men had grown very, very rich through their own genius for money-making, supplemented perhaps by accidental favors from law and public officials, therefore politics in some way might possibly concern the private citizen, might account for the curious discrepancy between his labor and its reward. The impression was growing that, while the energy of the citizen determined the PRODUCTION of wealth, it was politics that determined the distribution of wealth. And under the influence of this impression, the percentage of sober, steady, reliable voters who "stood by the grand old party" had shrunk to about seventy, while the percentage of voters who had to be worried about had grown to about thirty.

The Kelly-House problem was, what shall we do as to that annoying thirty per cent?

Kelly--for he was THE brain of the bi-partisan machine, proposed to throw the election to the House-Reform "combine." His henchmen and House's made a careful poll, and he sat up all night growing haggard and puffy-eyed over the result. According to this poll, not only was the League's entire ticket to be elected, but also Galland, despite his having the Republican, the Democratic and the Reform nominations, was to be beaten by the League's Falconer. He couldn't understand it. The Sawyer meetings were quite up to his expectations and indicated that the Republican rank and file was preparing to swallow the Sawyer dose without blinking. The Alliance and the Democratic meetings were equally satisfactory. Hull was "making a hit." Everywhere he had big crowds and enthusiasm. The League meetings were only slightly better attended than during the last campaign; no indication there of the League "landslide."

Yet Kelly could not, dared not, doubt that poll. It was his only safe guide. And it assured him that the long-dreaded disaster was at hand. In vain was the clever trick of nominating a popular, "clean" young reformer and opposing him with an unpopular regular of the most offensive type--more offensive even than a professional politician of unsavory record. At last victory was to reward the tactics of Victor Dorn, the slow, patient building which for several years now had been rasping the nerves of Boss Kelly.

What should he do?

It was clear to him that the doom of the old system was settled. The plutocrats, the upper-class crowd--the "silk stockings," as they had been called from the days when men wore knee-breeches--they fancied that this nation-wide movement was sporadic, would work out in a few years, and that the people would return to their allegiance. Kelly had no such delusions. Issuing from the depths of the people, he understood. They were learning a little something at last. They were discovering that the ever higher prices for everything and stationary or falling wages and salaries had some intimate relation with politics; that at the national capitol, at the state capitol, in the county courthouse, in the city hall their share of the nation's vast annual production of wealth was being determined--and that the persons doing the dividing, though elected by them, were in the employ of the plutocracy. Kelly, seeing and comprehending, felt that it behooved him to get for his masters--and for himself--all that could be got in the brief remaining time. Not that he was thinking of giving up the game; nothing so foolish as that. It would be many a year before the plutocracy could be routed out, before the people would have the intelligence and the persistence to claim and to hold their own. In the meantime, they could be fooled and robbed by a hundred tricks. He was not a constitutional lawyer, but he had practical good sense, and could enjoy the joke upon the people in their entanglement in the toils of their own making. Through fear of governmental tyranny they had divided authority among legislators, executives and judges, national, state, local. And, behold, outside of the government, out where they had never dreamed of looking, had grown up a tyranny that was perpetuating itself by dodging from one of these divided authorities to another, eluding capture, wearing out the not too strong perseverance of popular pursuit.

But, thanks to Victor Dorn, the local graft was about to be taken away from the politicians and the plutocracy. How put off that unpleasant event? Obviously, in the only way left unclosed. The election must be stolen.

It is a very human state of mind to feel that what one wants somehow has already become in a sense one's property. It is even more profoundly human to feel that what one has had, however wrongfully, cannot justly be taken away. So Mr. Kelly did not regard himself as a thief, taking what did not belong to him; no, he was holding on to and defending his own.