HOW A SPEAKERSHIP WAS FOUGHT FOR
Fate now and then turns jester in a bitter way, and stoops to ironies
and grinning sarcasm. Often it gives with the right hand only to take
with the left, and blinded ones are set to chop and saw and plane those
trees which in the end make gallows for their hopes. The story of the
world shows many an inadvertent Frankenstein and deeply justifies the
grewsome Mrs. Shelley.
Something less than two years prior to that evening when Senator Hanway
took the congealed Mr. Gwynn into a corner and told him how, with his
great Anaconda Airline, he should cut a figure in the selection of a
next Speaker for the House of Representatives, it had been that
statesman's fortune to so reconstruct a tariff that it gave unusual
riches and thereby unusual comfort to the dominant ones of a certain
manufacturing Northeastern State. This commonwealth at the time was
politically in the hands of the party opposed to Senator Hanway.
Mollified by the friendly tariff and anxious to mark their gratitude,
those dominant ones arose and in the following autumn elected to be
Governor of said State a middle-aged individual, eminent for obstinacy
and a kind of bovine integrity that nothing might corrupt or turn aside.
The Obstinate One of course belonged with the party of Senator Hanway.
At this pinch a vile chance befell. No sooner was the Obstinate One
given the Governorship of a State doubtful and accounted the enemy's
country, than straightway he was looked upon as White House timber by
sundry architects of politics, and thereafter his name went more or less
linked with a possible Presidency. The situation stirred the spleen of
Senator Hanway. It was discouraging to have those identical tariff
triumphs, which had been intended as an argument favorable to himself,
give birth to a rival; one also who, for his geography and the
popularity which those personal obstinacies and thick-skulled
integrities invoked, might work a grave disturbance in his plans. To
make bad worse, the Obstinate One possessed a sinister luck of his own
and with closed eyes backed into a fight on the right side and won it
against a pack of lobby wolves who were yelping and snapping about the
State Treasury. This, although the Obstinate One of all men least
appreciated what he had done, confirmed him as a valuable asset of
party; pending further honors the public to reward him gave him the
title of Governor Obstinate.
In his white, still, rippleless way, Senator Hanway hated in his soul's
soul the name of Governor Obstinate. Night and day he carried that dull,
fortunate gentleman on his swell of thought and never ceased to consider
how he might deal him a blow or withstand him in any Presidential
stepping forward. And yet at no time had Senator Hanway--and himself the
master of every art of cord and creese in politics--felt more helpless.
If Governor Obstinate had been no more than just a finished politician,
a mere Crillon of political fence, Senator Hanway might have flashed his
ready point between his ribs. But the other's very crudities defended
him. He was primitive to the verge of despair. Even his strength was
primitive, inasmuch as it dwelt among the people rather than with the
machinists of party. Senator Hanway's monkish brow went often puckered
of a most uncanonical frown as he thought upon that sardonic Destiny
which had thrust this Governor Obstinate forward to become a stumbling
block in his way. In his angry contempt he could compare him to nothing
save a grizzly bear.
Whatever the justice of this last shaggy simile, even Senator Hanway
could not deny its formidable side. A grizzly, whether in fact or in
hyperbole, is no one good to meet. There is a supremacy of the
primitive; when the natural and the artificial have collided the latter
has more than once come limping off. Our soldiers cannot make the
Indians fight their fashion; the Indians make the soldiers fight _their_
fashion. If the soldiers were dense enough to insist upon their
formation, the Indians--fighting all over the field and each red warrior
for himself--would fill them as full of holes as a colander. When,
therefore, Senator Hanway called Governor Obstinate a grizzly, it was a
name of respect. The usual methods would not prevail in his stubborn
case. Most of all, money could not be employed to overthrow him; for his
foundations, like the foundations of any other grizzly, were original
and beyond the touch of money.
Now all this served to palsy the strength of Senator Hanway. In one
shape or another, and whether by promise or actual present production,
money was his one great tool; and where the tool has lost its power the
artisan is also powerless. It is not to Senator Hanway's discredit that
he would fail where money failed; Richelieu, wanting money, would have
been a turtle on its back. Wherefore, let it be rewritten that Senator
Hanway in the face of those clumsy, uncouth, half-seeing yet tremendous
potentialities of his enemy was seized of a helplessness never before
felt. To oppose the other with only those narrow means of money was like
trying to put down a Sioux uprising with a resolution of the Board of
Trade. Still, he must do his best; he must hold this Governor Obstinate
as much as he might in check, trusting to the chapter of accidents,
which in politics is a very lair of surprises, to suggest final ways and
means to baffle his advance.
For the business of making him President, the complaisant Senate had
become the workshop of Senator Hanway. Now, on the brink of a new
Congress, one which would be in session when the nominating convention
of his party was called to order and therefore might be supposed to own
power over its action and the Presidential ticket it would put up,
Senator Hanway resolved to add the House of Representatives to his
machine. He would elect its Speaker, and make the House an annex to his
workshop of a Senate. He would hook up House and Senate as a coachman
hooks up his team, and driving them tandem or abreast as the exigencies
of the hour suggested, see how far two such powerful agencies might take
him on his White House road.
It was on the side of Senator Hanway a brilliant thought and a daring
one, this plan to seize a Speakership and apply it to his personal
fortunes; for your Speakership is that office second only to a
Presidency, and comes often to be the latter's superior in practical
force. Those wise ones who designed the government intended the House of
Representatives to be a republic. Through its own groveling abjections,
however, it long ago sunk to an autocracy with the Speaker in the rôle
of autocrat. It sold its birthright for no one knows what mess of
pottage to pass its slavish days beneath a tyranny of the gavel. The
Speaker settles all things. No measure is proposed, no bill passes, no
member speaks except by the Speaker's will. He constructs the committees
and selects their chairmen and lays out their work. With a dozen
members, every one of whom votes and acts beneath his thumb, the Speaker
transacts the story of the House. So far as the other three hundred and
forty odd members are concerned, the folk who sent them might as well
have written a letter. They live as much without art or part or lot in
planning and executing House affairs as do the caged menagerie animals
in the planning and execution of the affairs of what show they happen to
exist as the attractions. These caged ones of the House are never
regarded and but seldom heard. The best that one of them may gain is
"Leave to print"; which is a kind of consent to be fraudulent, and
permits a member to pretend through the Congressional Record that he
made a speech (which he never made) and was overwhelmed by applause
(which he did not receive) which swept down in thunderous peals (during
moments utterly silent) from crowded galleries (as empty as a church).
Senator Hanway, when he decided to pick out a House Speaker favorable to
his hopes, had plenty of time wherein to lay his plans. The personnel of
a coming House is known for over a year; the members are elected nearly
thirteen months before they take their seats. These thirteen months of
grace are granted the new member by the Constitution on a hopeful theory
that he will devote them to a study of his country's needs. In this
instance, as in many another, theory and practice wander wide apart; the
new member gives those thirteen months to a profound study of his own
needs, and concerns himself no more over the nation's than over
wine-pressing in far-away Bordeaux. It is the glaring fault of every
scheme of government, your own being no exception to the rule, that it
seems meant for man as he should be rather than for man as he is.
Every member of the coming House, among matters of personal moment to
himself, had given no little thought to what committees he would be
placed upon; and this, in the nature of House things, likewise compelled
him to a consideration of the Speakership and who should fill it. It was
by remembering those committee hopes and fears of members, and adroitly
fomenting them, that Senator Hanway expected to control the Speakership
election.
But he must go warily to work. Coming from the Senate end of the
Capitol, Senator Hanway, in his proposed interference in the
organization of the House, must maintain himself discreetly in the dark.
It was not a task to accomplish blowing a bugle. The House had
surrendered its powers to the Speaker; but it had retained its vanity,
and like all weak animals it was the more vain for being weak. The
members, were it once known and parcel of the common gossip how they
inclined to Senator Hanway's manipulation, would be compelled to rebel.
They would be driven to oppose him as a method of preserving what they
called their self-respect. Aware of this, Senator Hanway never came into
the open, never appeared upon the surface. He secretly pitched upon a
candidate among the older ones of the House and made his deal with him,
working the wires of his diplomacy from below.
There was peculiar demand for effort on Senator Hanway's part. His man,
when now he had selected him, would not find himself uninterrupted or
unopposed in his march for that Speakership. There was another, and if
native popularity were to count a stronger hand stretched forth to seize
the gavel prize. Had it lain in the cards, Senator Hanway, who always
sought his ends on lines of least resistance, would himself have pitched
upon this stronger one. But such was beyond the question. The strong one
claimed to be of that party clan which pushed the offensive Governor
Obstinate for the Presidency; and this not only offered a perfect reason
why Senator Hanway should make no alliance with him, but it multiplied
the necessity for his defeat.
That member upon whom Senator Hanway settled for Speaker owned the
biting name of Frost; it was an instance, however, when there was
nothing in a name. Mr. Frost was a round, genial personage and only
biting with occasional sarcasms; then, it is true, his sentences cut
like a rawhide. He was big, breezy, careless, quick, and coming of an
aquatic ancestry, oceanic in his sort; even his walk reminded one of a
ground swell. And yet he was defective as a candidate. The House members
liked him well, despite those verbal acridities which shaved the surface
of debate as lawns are shaven by a scythe; but with the last word there
existed no recognized House or party reason, whether of the past, the
present or the future, why he should be made Speaker. In the lay of
House topography he was on the wrong side of the river from the
Speakership, and to land him within stretch of the gavel required that
Senator Hanway either ferry or pontoon him across. This the latter
gentleman set himself to accomplish by a series of intrigues and
stratagems that would have brightened the fame of a Talleyrand.
The statesman opposed to Mr. Frost for the Speakership was a personage
named Hawke. He stood possessed of honesty, intelligence, and energy;
also he had been for long the leader of his party in the House, and
given his name to a tariff measure. Without one gleam of humor, he was
of a temper hot as that of any Hecla, and like his fellow volcano, being
often in a state of eruption, he offered many reasons for being admired
and none for being loved.
This should be a key to the man.
He had been a brave soldier during the Civil War, and when his men, most
of whom were armed with shotguns--it being in the early hours of that
strife and these men arming themselves--complained that their weapons
were no match for the Enfields of the foe, rebuked them fiercely.
"General," said the spokesman of the soldiers; "these yere shotguns
ain't no even break for them rifles the Yanks are shootin'!"
"They are a match for them," retorted the furious Mr. Hawke, "if you
will only go close enough."
For all his soberness of humor and choleric upheavals, Mr. Hawke,
because of his record as a House leader and a tariff maker--he had
tinkered together that identical bill which, when Senator Hanway later
revamped it in the Senate, produced the Obstinate One as a Governor--was
the legitimate heir to the Speakership; and in the House, where
tradition is something sacred and custom itself the strongest of
arguments, his defeat for the place was thereby rendered well-nigh
impossible. Senator Hanway had undertaken no child's task when he went
about the gavel elevation of the popular, yet--by House usage--the
illegitimate Mr. Frost.
Months before ever Senator Hanway was granted the honor of knowing Mr.
Gwynn, he had been burrowingly busy about the Speakership. As a primary
step he was obliged to suppress his ebullient brother-in-law. Mr.
Harley, the moment a conquest of the House in the interests of Senator
Hanway was proposed, waxed threateningly exuberant. He was for issuing
forth to vociferate and slap members upon their backs and jovially
arrange committeeships on the giffgaff principle of give us the
Speakership and you shall become a Chairman. The optimistic Mr. Harley,
whose methods were somewhat coarse and who did most things with an ax,
was precisely of that hopeful sort who would advertise an auction of the
lion's hide while it was yet upon the beast. Senator Hanway, with
instincts safer and more upon the order of the mole's, forbade such
campaigns of noise.
"You must keep silent, John," said he, "and never let men know what we
are about. You are inclined, apparently, to regard a Speakership as you
might a swarm of bees; you think one has only to beat a tin pan long
enough or blow a tin horn loud enough in order to hive it according to
one's wish. The Speakership, however, so far from being a swarm of bees
is more like a flock of blackbirds, and the system to which you incline
would prove the readiest means of frightening away our every chance. In
short, you must work by my orders and meet no one, say nothing, except
as I direct."
Then Senator Hanway sent Mr. Harley, much modified of his vigor, with a
secret invitation to Mr. Frost; when that personage was brought to the
privacy of the Harley house, he laid open to his ambition those gavel
prospects which he, Senator Hanway, had already constructed in his
thoughts.
There was no conflict of argument with Mr. Frost; he rose to the
suggestion like a bass to a fly. Knowing himself to be of a genius too
openly bluff and frank, and no one to conquer those elements which his
campaign would require, he put himself in the hollow of Senator Hanway's
hand to be controlled by him with shut eyes. This voluntary prompt
submission on the part of Mr. Frost had a further subduing effect upon
Mr. Harley. In imitation thereof he, too, began to speak in whispers and
step with care, and ask his eminent relative for orders in all he went
about.
Now when Senator Hanway had trained his partner and his candidate to
come to heel he began to unravel his diplomacy. By his suggestion, Mr.
Frost took into confidence two of his party colleagues in the House.
These would on every occasion act as his agents or lieutenants. Senator
Hanway and Mr. Harley were not to appear too obviously.
Senator Hanway, lying back in the dark, looked over the field and sent
those two lieutenants variously to a score of members. These were
sounded on the engaging topic of committee chairmanships, and one by one
such coigns of congressional, not to say personal, advantage as the
heads of Ways and Means, the Appropriations, the Foreign Affairs, the
Naval, the Military and a number of other great sub-bodies were disposed
of--bartered away on the contingency always of Mr. Frost's selection to
be the Speaker. The entire House was laid off into lots like real estate
and sold, the purchaser promising his vote and influence in the party
caucus, taking therefor a verbal contract to give him the committee
place he preferred.
This labor of an advance partition of the spoils and the linking of
every possible faction with the campaign of Mr. Frost, was concluded
about a fortnight prior to Mrs. Harley's dinner to Mr. Gwynn. As Senator
Hanway ran his experienced eye over the list and counted the noses of
Mr. Frost's array, he saw that it was not enough. The pontoon would not
reach; there was still a wide expanse of water between his candidate and
the coveted Speakership. As matters rested, and every morsel of House
patronage disposed of to this hungry one or that, the enemy, Mr.
Hawke--being doubly the enemy for that he was become an open supporter
of Governor Obstinate and made no secret that his candidacy for the
Speakership was meant to be a step towards making that gentleman
President--would still rise victorious in caucus by full forty votes.
Senator Hanway's anxious wits were driven hard. He had drawn to Mr.
Frost every splinter of power he could command by barter, and thrown in
his own State delegation in the House by sheer stress of that machine
which he had upreared for his own defense at home. It was not enough;
even the subtraction of two State delegations from the standards of the
foe, by the adroit scheme, applied to each delegation, of dragging one
of its members forward to be a candidate for Speaker, was not enough.
After ten months of labor, Senator Hanway went over the result and could
read nothing therein save failure. And it was like an icicle through his
heart; for aside from what advantage the control of the House might give
his own ambitions, he knew beyond question that with the gavel in the
fingers of a professed partisan of Governor Obstinate, the latter thick,
yet fortunate, individual would occur as the next Presidential candidate
of his party so surely as the sun came up on a convention morning.
Senator Hanway was in this valley of gloom when he heard of Mr. Gwynn.
It was Mr. Harley, ever brisk in railway matters, who told him of that
gentleman as the Colossus of the Anaconda Airline.
"He holds no offices in the management of the company," explained Mr.
Harley, "but, being millions upon millions a majority shareholder his
least word is Anaconda Airline law."
Senator Hanway did not have to be told of the influence of railways in
the destinies of his country. He glanced up at a map on the wall; there
he could see the nation caught like some great clumsy fish in a very
seine of railways. He traced the black, thread-like flight, from
seaboard to seaboard, of the Anaconda Airline. Then he made a
calculation. The Anaconda Airline was the political backbone, first one
State and then another, of forty House members, twenty-three of whom
being of his own complexion of politics, would have a caucus vote. Of
the twenty-three, luck upon good luck! twenty belonged to Mr. Hawke. If
Senator Hanway might only get the Anaconda Airline to crack the thong of
its authority over these recalcitrants, they could be whipped into the
Frost traces. Not one would dare defy an Anaconda order; it would be
political hari-kari. At this point our wily Senator Hanway began laying
plans to bring Mr. Gwynn within his reach; it was in deference to those
plans that our solemn capitalist found himself upon Mrs. Hanway-Harley's
hospitable right hand on that evening of the dinner, with his severe
legs outstretched beneath the Harley mahogany.
"I will see you to-morrow--with your permission," observed Senator
Hanway, as he parted with Mr. Gwynn.
When Mr. Gwynn returned from Mrs. Hanway-Harley's he stood in the middle
of the floor, and told Richard, word for word, all that had taken place.
The latter young gentleman was in a prodigious good humor. For the first
time in his life he had done a day's work, being the twenty-five hundred
word story written and dispatched to the _Daily Tory_, and that was one
reason for joy. Besides, there was the manager's wire of praise--and
Richard thought it marked a weakness in him--that, too, had warmed the
cockles of his heart. Being in good humor, he listened without
interrupting comment to the rasping, parrot tones of Mr. Gwynn while
that gentleman, without inflection or emphasis or slightest shade of
personal interest, told the tale of the night's adventures, from Mrs.
Hanway-Harley's flattery and Mr. Harley's song, to Senator Hanway's last
handclasp and that parting promise of a call.
"And that is all, sir," said Mr. Gwynn, at the close, coughing
apologetically behind his palm as though fearful of criticism.
"You did well," was Richard's response. "When Senator Hanway calls
to-morrow, introduce me to him at once. After that, I shall talk and you
will acquiesce. You may go."
"Thank you, sir. Very good, sir!" said Mr. Gwynn.
Mr. Gwynn received Senator Hanway in his library; Richard was present,
considering the world at large from a window.
"And first of all," said Mr. Gwynn, after greeting Senator Hanway, "and
first of all, let me introduce to your notice Mr. Storms. I may say to
you, sir, I have confidence in Mr. Storms; I act much by his advice."
And here Mr. Gwynn looked at Richard as though appealing for
corroboration.
Senator Hanway, from whose nimble faculties nothing escaped, noted this
appeal. He thought the less of it, since Mr. Harley had given him some
glint of the measureless millions of Mr. Gwynn, and he deduced from this
stiff turning towards Richard, this brittle deference, nothing save a
theory that Mr. Gwynn, by virtue of his tremendous riches, had grown too
great to do his own listening and thinking. It was as plain, as it was
proper, that he should hire them done, precisely as he hired a groom for
his horses or a valet to superintend his clothes. Senator Hanway,
himself, was at bottom impressed by nothing so much as money, and was
quite prepared to believe that one of the world's wealthiest men--for
such he understood to be the case of Mr. Gwynn--would prove in word and
deed and thought a being wholly different from everyone about him.
Wherefore, his heaped millions accounted in Mr. Gwynn for what otherwise
might have been considered by Senator Hanway as queernesses.
To add to this, Mr. Gwynn was of a certain select circle of English
exclusives; Senator Hanway had learned that much from his sister, Mrs.
Hanway-Harley. It was to be expected then that he would have someone
about him to furnish brains for his deliberations, and to make up his
mind as a laundress makes up shirts. Senator Hanway, knowing these
things of Mr. Gwynn, was in no wise surprised that he possessed in his
service one who was hearer, talker, and decider, just as ancient kings
kept folk about whose business was to make witty retorts for them and
conduct sparkling conversations in their stead, they themselves being
too royal for anything so much beneath that level of exalted inanity,
which as all men know is the only proper mark of princely minds.
Something of this raced hit or miss through Senator Hanway's thoughts,
as Mr. Gwynn presented Richard and then relapsed--hinge by hinge as
though his joints were rusty with much aristocratic unbending--into a
chair.
Richard gave him no space to dwell upon the phenomenon. He came forward
with a little atmosphere of deference; for Richard had his own deep
designs. Then, too, Senator Hanway was white of hair and twice his age,
to say nothing of being a certain young lady's uncle.
"Mr. Gwynn has told me of you," said he. Then pushing straight for the
point after methods of his own, he continued: "What is it the Anaconda
Airline can do? Mr. Gwynn is quite convinced, from what he has been told
of those positions you have from time to time assumed in the Senate,
that his own interest with that of every railway owner lies in following
your leadership. Indeed, I think he has decided to adopt whatever
suggestion you may make." Richard glanced towards Mr. Gwynn, and that
great man gave his mandarin bow.
Senator Hanway, while smitten of vague amazement at Mr. Gwynn's
acquiescent spirit, accepted it without pause. However marvelous it
might be, at least he himself ran no risk. More than that, on second
thought it did not occur to him as so peculiarly unusual; a Senator in a
measure becomes inured to the wondrous.
Senator Hanway did not reply directly to Richard's query. Direct replies
were not the habit of this practiced one. He made a speech full of
flattering generalities. He spoke of Richard's connection with the
_Daily Tory_, and expanded upon the weight and influence of that
journal. Also, with a beaming albeit delicate patronage which Richard
stomached for reasons of his own, he intimated complimentary things of
Richard himself and seemed to congratulate the _Daily Tory_ on the
services of one so keen, so sure, so graphic; which last was the more
kind, since Senator Hanway could have known no single reason for
assuming anything of the sort. He told Richard that he hoped to see him
personally every day. Here Richard broke in on the Senatorial flow to
ask if he might wait upon Senator Hanway every morning at eleven.
"For I am warned by Mr. Gwynn," explained Richard, with an alert
mendacity which would have done honor, to Senator Hanway himself, "that
he will hold anything short of calling upon you once a day as barefaced
neglect of his interests."
"Certainly, sir; most barefaced!" creaked Mr. Gwynn, giving the mandarin
bow.
Senator Hanway would be graciously pleased to see Richard every morning
at eleven. Also, he would aid him, as far as was proper, with a recount
of what gusts and windy currents of news were moving in the upper ethers
of government.
Then, having been polite, Senator Hanway got down to business and stated
that Mr. Frost, if Speaker, would favor a certain pooling bill, much
desired by railways, and particularly dear to the Anaconda Airline. On
the obdurate other hand, Mr. Hawke was an enemy to pooling bills and
railways. Mr. Gwynn's interest was plainly with Mr. Frost.
"Not that I care personally for the success of Mr. Frost," remarked
Senator Hanway, "but I know how the railways desire that pooling bill,
and how that pooling bill is a darling measure with Mr. Frost."
"Which brings us back," observed Richard, who never took his eye off a
question, once put, until he saw it mated with an answer, "to Mr.
Gwynn's first interrogatory: What can the Anaconda Airline do?"
Senator Hanway explained. The Anaconda Airline could press down the
weights of its influence upon those twenty-three members. The Anaconda
influence might better be exerted through its President and General
Attorney, and perhaps what special attorneys were local to the
congressional districts of those twenty-three.
"Mr. Gwynn," observed Richard, "anticipated something of the kind, and I
think is prepared to request those officers you name to come to
Washington."
"They shall be requested, sir; certainly, sir," rasped Mr. Gwynn.
Richard's words seemed ever to reverberate in Mr. Gwynn's noble interior
as in a cavern, and thereafter to issue forth by way of his mouth in the
manner of an echo. "Certainly, sir; they shall be requested," repeated
the cavernous Mr. Gwynn.
"Now this is highly gratifying," said Senator Hanway. "And you will have
them call upon me, too, I've no doubt. You should wire them at once; the
caucus, you know, isn't ten days away; Congress convenes on the first
Monday of next month."
Senator Hanway, being of a quick intelligence, had by this time found
his rightful line. He divided himself fairly; for he gave his entire
conversation to Richard while he conferred upon Mr. Gwynn his whole
respect. In good truth, the less Mr. Gwynn said and the less he seemed
to hear and understand, the more Senator Hanway did him honor in his
heart. The rigid witlessness of Mr. Gwynn fairly came over him as the
token and sign of an indubitable nobility, and it was with a feeling
treading upon reverence for that wonderful man that Senator Hanway arose
to go.
"I am much refreshed by this interview," said he, taking Mr. Gwynn's
hand and shaking it pump-handlewise. "Your help should insure Mr.
Frost's success. With Mr. Frost Speaker, railway interests will be
safe-guarded. And," continued Senator Hanway, quoting from one of his
Senate speeches, lifting his voice the while, and falling into a fine
declamatory pose, "he who safeguards the railroads, safeguards his
country. Patriotism cannot count the debt the nation owes the railroads.
Had it not been for the knitting together of the country by the
railroads, bringing into closer touch with one another the West and the
East, the South and the North--the wiping out of sectionalism--the
annihilation of special interests by making all interests general--all
done by the railroads, sir!--this country, broken across the knee of
mountain ranges and sawed into regions by great rivers, would ere this
have been frittered into fragments; and where we have now the glorious
United States--a free and unified people--Europe, who envies as well as
fears us, would be gratified by the spectacle of four and perhaps a half
dozen different and differing countries, each alien and, doubtless, each
hostile to the others." Senator Hanway had reached the door. "And that
this condition of disseverment does not exist," cried he, as he bowed
with final grace to Mr. Gwynn, who approved stonily, "is due to you,
sir; and to gentlemen like you; and to those railways which, like the
Anaconda Airline, form the ties that bind us safe against such
dismembering possibilities and give us, for war or for peace, absolute
coherency as a commonwealth."