Holman Day

“ Mere achievement may attract respect. Erected on culture, it wins still more. Respect feeds only one appetite of ambition. True ambition is hungry for affection and friends, placing lovers ahead of sycophants. And the finer qualities, the softer virtues, attract more surely than mere fame.
These and similar reflections came to young Thornton rather incoherently. It was not that he desired the affection or the admiration of Madeleine Presson. But this young woman represented for him a new phase of the world he was meeting in its broader sense—and he was ambitious with the zest of youth. ”

“ From the storied past, gentlemen of the convention, we draw precept and example, lesson and moral, hope and inspiration. As nature has stored in the bowels of the earth the oil that serves the lighthouse beacons of to-day, so life has stored in various reservoirs human experience that can light the path through troublous times in these latter days. Written on the scroll of history, limned on the page of law, we find the words of the fathers, sane and helpful thought and good counsel. In days of doubt and worry and despair we may meet the fathers on the written page. ”

“ That young man was not thinking of the orator, then. His thoughts were on the old man at whose side he sat—the old man who listened in dignified patience.
Now the delegates sniffed the truth. A word had put them on the trail. They were not sure. But they suspected. And mere suspicion sent them upon their settees, cheering wildly. Distrust of Spinney, sullen disloyalty to the machine-created Everett, furnished a soil in which hope for another solution of the tangle sprang with miraculous growth.
Linton waited until the roar of voices died away. ”

“ From the minute you came into my dooryard to-day you've acted as though you thought I'd stirred this whole uproar in the State."
"Did you ever know a man to get anywhere in politics if he didn't play the game—honesty or no honesty?"
"Yes, a few—they got there, but they didn't stay there long," replied the Duke, a flicker of humor in his wistfulness.
"You bet they didn't," agreed the chairman. "Thelismer, I'm just as honest as the world will let me be and succeed! But when a man gets to be perfectly honest in politics, and tries to lead his crowd at the same time, they turn around and swat him. ”

“ He did not discuss all this with his grandfather. If he had, Thelismer Thornton would have been vastly interested. He might have been amused. Probably he would have been more amused than interested, for hot youth and glowing ideals have humorous phases for the man who has lived among men for more than eighty years.
But that he had unloosed a bottle imp in his own family would not have occurred to the old man, even after he had listened, for he still had the cynical belief that circumstances must control, interest convert, and personal profit kill the most glowing ardor in reform. ”

“ In the open arena of life his training had been that of man to man, and the best man taking the prize. And his reading during the long evenings had been more in the way of education in public matters than he had realized. As for ideals, he had followed the masterful men who preached a gospel that appealed to him, living the life of the open, battling for the weak against the selfishly strong—so it seemed to the one who studied their achievements on the printed page. With his own opportunity now thrust upon him, Harlan Thornton determined to make candor his code, honesty his system. ”

“ He liked to know that the boys were turning out to the caucus. His perch was a lofty one. He could see that the one long street of Fort Canibas was well gridironed with teams—horses munching at hitching-posts, wagons thrusting their tails into the roadway.
It was quiet at Thornton's end of the village. There was merely twitter of birds in the silver poplar that shaded his seat, busy chatter of swallows, who were plastering up their mud nests under the eaves of the old blockhouse across the road from him. It was so quiet that he could hear a tumult at the other end of the village ”

“ And Arba Spinney's methods may be known from the fact that once he got enough votes to make him a State Senator by asking his auditors at each rally to feel of the lumps in the corners of their ready-made vests. A man who is fingering the sheddings of shoddy feels like voting for the candidate who declares that he will make a sheep a respectable member of society once more. ”

“ For one hundred and fifty dollars every two years, and my mileage, I was to give up all my own business and my interests, and play statesman, pure and holy, for you up here? Refuse to help those men down there who helped me when I wanted something, and go down in the rotunda twice a day and thumb my nose at the portraits of the fathers of the State because they played politics in their time? ”

“ As he read on, Harlan opened his eyes as well as his ears. The convention of the morrow had been blocked out to the last detail. Every motion that was to be made, every step that was to be taken, had its man assigned to it—and that man had already been notified and tagged. Fifteen hundred men, assembled presumably as free and independent agents to take counsel for the good of the party, were here bound to the narrowest routine, with programme cut and dried to such an extent that one who dared to lift his voice to interrupt would be considered an interloper. ”

“ Every day that passes under present conditions adds its little to the damnation of the moral principle in our boys and girls, growing up with eyes and ears open. God, I wish I were twenty years younger! But I'm old enough to have fantastic notions; old enough to insist on an answer to my question, in spite of what you may think of my mental condition. Will you release me from that promise? I made it to the young men of this State—in my disgust at conditions, in my passion to do something to clean out this nest! ”

“ He did not try to stop me when I ran away—he even called after me, 'He's turned in at the church, you wild banshee!' They have told him things that have given him new respect for Harlan Thornton. But your grandfather?"
"He has learned that my love is my own affair, along with my politics."
"Let me do my part, Harlan," she said, proudly. "Love will light the waiting, and it will not seem waiting. When I take my place at your side he shall not be able to say that I am not the wife for you."
"It's enough for me to-night that I love you and you love me. The years must take care of themselves. ”

“ The Duke perceived it, for he realized what times had come upon the State. Spinney's bombast expressed the protest that was abroad. Rebellion, thirsty, does not seek the cold spring of Reason. It fuddles itself with hot speech, it riots—it dares not pause to ponder.
"The men that are running this State to-day are running it for themselves," he declaimed, as Thornton and his grandson came into the front rank of his listeners. "They want it all. I brand 'em for what they are. I could take glue and a hair-brush and make hogs out of every one of 'em!" ”

“ But they muttered among themselves, and one man called back over his shoulder: "It isn't the first time, General, that a man brave enough to lead battle charges hasn't shown that he's got the spirit to declare for the right against the wrong, when politics stands by with open ears!"
"There go some of the reformers you were asking your grandfather about a few weeks ago, Harlan," sneered the indignant chairman. "Those are the men who are holding themselves up as examples for all the rest of men to follow. Every one else is a rummy and a hellion, according to their ranking." ”

“ I shall say I am left to defeat because I refused to betray the people's interests. Then I shall appeal to the people as a whole—to Republicans and Democrats alike—for support at the polls. If there are enough honest men to elect me, very well. If the majority wants to hand the thing over to the looters and tricksters after the fair warning I give them, they will do so with their eyes open, and I'll accept the result and leave this State to itself."
Chairman Presson pushed himself slowly up out of his chair, his arms propping him, his face shoved forward. ”

“ Thornton, I say it here to your face, where all the boys can hear me: the people want a change in this State. I am not going behind a door to talk with you—that's been done too much! I stand in the open and say it! Open fighting after this—that's my code. I fight for the people. The people shall be put wise and kept wise to all that's going on."
"It's a good plan," counselled the Duke, unperturbed. "I see I can't tell you anything about advertising." He tapped a badge on the breast of a man near him.
"I'm for the people!" shouted Spinney. "The old wagon needs a new wheel-horse. ”

“ Gentlemen, some politicians, more than half a century ago, simply to use a temperance movement for bait in a political campaign, dragged into our party a moral, social, and economic question that belongs to the whole people—not merely to us as a party. Let the people, when the right time comes and they decide the matter differently, make a law that the majority desires and will stand behind. Just now we have in our constitution a law that forbids the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors in this State. ”

“ In her girlish frailness, as she bent above her clasped hands, huddled there in the black shadow of the porch, she seemed pitifully little and helpless and forsaken. The woe in her tones thrilled him. She was trying hard to control her voice.
"You see, Harlan, I can look ahead and understand how it will be. A woman does understand such things. That's the awful thing about being a woman—and looking ahead and knowing how it must be before it ever happens!" ”

“ Reform for reform's sake supersedes reform for the people's sake. Candidates have been afraid of those mouths. Such mouths as those outside there assert that they are talking for the whole people in the name of morality, but there are only a few mouths of that kind. It is time to test it out. I propose to see whether the people will not follow the real thing in honesty instead of the mere protestation of it. ”

“ The men concerned in the principal secret of the State Convention kept their mouths shut for the sake of self-preservation. But unquiet suspicion was abroad. The Democrats nosed, figured, guessed, and acted with more duplicity than had characterized their usual campaigns against the dominant party. Their leaders gave their party a platform that invited every one to get aboard. Every question was straddled. It was a document of craft expressed in terms of apparent candor. It elevated a demagogue as candidate for Governor, and promised every reform on the calendar. ”