The scar came up into his face to put agony into the reckless despair
that looked from his eyes. For an instant I stood on the threshold of
_his_ Chamber of Remorse and Vain Regret,--and well I knew where I was.
"Why not?" he asked bitterly. "There's always a--sort of horror--inside
me. And it grows until I can't bear it. And then--I drown it--why
shouldn't I?"
"That's very stupid for a man of your brains," said I. "There's
nothing--nothing in the world, except death--that can not be wiped out
or set right. Play the game, Doc. Play it with me for five years. Play
it for all there is in it. Then--go back, if you want to."
He thought a long time, and I did not try to hurry him. At length he
said, in his old off-hand manner: "Well, I'll go you, Senator; I'll not
touch a drop."
And he didn't. Whenever I thought I saw signs of the savage internal
battle against the weakness, I gave him something important and
absorbing to do, and I kept him busy until I knew the temptation had
lost its power for the time.
This is the proper place to put it on the record that he was the most
scrupulously honest man I have ever known. He dealt with the shadiest
and least scrupulous of men--those who train their consciences to be the
eager servants of their appetites; he handled hundreds of thousands of
dollars, millions, first and last, all of it money for which he could
never have been forced to account. He has had at one time as much as
half a million dollars in checks payable to bearer. I am not confiding
by nature or training, but I am confident that he kept not a penny for
himself beyond his salary and his fixed commission. I put his salary at
the outset, at ten thousand a year; afterward, at fifteen; finally, at
twenty. His commissions, perhaps, doubled it.
There are many kinds of honesty nowadays. There is "corporate honesty,"
not unlike that proverbial "honor among thieves," which secures a fair
or fairly fair division of the spoils. Then there is "personal
honesty," which subdivides into three kinds--legal, moral, and
instinctive. Legal honesty needs no definition. Moral honesty defies
definition--how untangle its intertwinings of motives of fear, pride,
insufficient temptation, sacrifice of the smaller chance in the hope of
a larger? Finally, there is instinctive honesty--the rarest, the only
bed-rock, unassailable kind. Give me the man who is honest simply
because it never occurs to him, and never could occur to him, to be
anything else. That is Woodruff.
There is, to be sure, another kind of instinctively honest man--he who
disregards loyalty as well as self-interest in his uprightness. But
there are so few of these in practical life that they may be
disregarded.
Perhaps I should say something here as to the finances of my combine,
though it was managed in the main precisely like all these
political-commercial machines that control both parties in all the
states, except a few in the South.
My assessments upon the various members of my combine were sent, for
several years, to me, afterward to Woodruff directly, in one thousand,
five thousand, and ten thousand dollar checks, sometimes by mail, and at
other times by express or messenger.
These checks were always payable to bearer; and I made through Woodruff,
for I kept to the far background in all my combine's affairs, an
arrangement with several large banks in different parts of the state,
including one at the capital, that these checks were to be cashed
without question, no matter who presented them, provided there was a
certain flourish under the line where the amount was written in figures.
Sometimes these checks were signed by the corporation, and sometimes
they were the personal checks of the president or some other high
official. Often the signature was that of a person wholly disconnected,
so far as the public knew. Once, I remember, Roebuck sent me a thousand
dollar check signed by a distinguished Chicago lawyer who was just then
counsel to his opponent in a case involving millions, a case which
Roebuck afterward won!
Who presented these checks? I could more easily say who did not.
From the very beginning of my control I kept my promise to reduce the
cost of the political business to my clients. When I got the machine
thoroughly in hand, I saw I could make it cost them less than a third of
what they had been paying, on the average, for ten years. I cut off,
almost at a stroke, a horde of lobbyists, lawyers, threateners without
influence, and hangers-on of various kinds. I reduced the payments for
legislation to a system, instead of the shameless, scandal-creating and
wasteful auctioneering that had been going on for years.
In fact, so cheaply did I run the machine that I saw it would be most
imprudent to let my clients have the full benefit. Cheapness would have
made them uncontrollably greedy and exacting, and would have given them
a wholly false idea of my value as soon as it had slipped their short
memories how dearly they used to pay.
So I continued to make heavy assessments, and put by the surplus in a
reserve fund for emergencies. I thought, for example, that I might some
day have trouble with one or more members of my combine; my reserve
would supply me with the munitions for forcing insurgents to return to
their agreements.
This fund was in no sense part of my private fortune. Nowhere else, I
think, do the eccentricities of conscience show themselves more
interestingly than in the various attitudes of the various political
leaders toward the large sums which the exigencies of commercialized
politics place absolutely and secretly under their control. I have no
criticism for any of these attitudes.
I have lived long enough and practically enough to learn not to
criticize the morals of men, any more than I criticize their facial
contour or their physical build. "As many men, so many minds,"--and
morals. Wrong, for practical purposes, is that which a man can not
cajole or compel his conscience to approve.
It so happened that I had a sense that to use my assessments for my
private financial profits would be wrong. Therefore, my private fortune
has been wholly the result of the opportunities which came through my
intimacy with Roebuck and such others of the members of my combine as
were personally agreeable,--or, perhaps it would be more accurate to
say, not disagreeable, for, in the circumstances, I naturally saw a side
of those men which a friend must never see in a friend. I could not help
having toward most of these distinguished clients of mine much the
feeling his lawyer has for the guilty criminal he is defending.
X