thics of a theoretical school,
he knew only enough about practical politics to be very certain in his
own mind that they were all wrong. And if Gantry's account could be
trusted, there were none but practical politics in the State where his
father was reputed to be the dictator.

Hitherto his ambition had been to build up a modest business practice in
some Eastern city, and, like other aspiring young lawyers, he had been
filling out the perspective of the picture with the look ahead to a
possible time when some great corporation should need his services in
permanence. He was of the new generation, and he knew that the lawyer of
the courts was slowly but surely giving place to the lawyer of business.
Without attempting to carry the modern business situation bodily over
into the domain of pure ethics, he was still young enough and
enthusiastic enough to lay down the general principle that a great
corporation, being itself a creation of the law, must necessarily be
law-abiding, and, if not entirely ethical in its dealings with the
public, at least equitably just. Therefore his ideal in his own
profession was the man who could successfully safeguard large interests,
promote the beneficent outreachings of corporate capital, and be the
adviser of the man or men to whom the greater America owes its place at
the head of the civilized nations.

Oddly enough, though Gantry's attitude had been uncompromisingly
partisan, Blount had failed to recognize in the railroad official a
skilful pleader for the special interests--the interests of the few
against those of the many. Hence he was preparing to go to the new field
with a rather strong prepossession in favor of the defendant
corporation. In their later conversation Gantry had intimated pretty
broadly that there was room for an assistant corporation counsel for the
railroad, with headquarters in the capital of the Sage-brush State.
Blount assumed that the requirements, in the present crisis at least,
would be political rather than legal, and in his mind's eye he saw
himself in the prefigured perspective, standing firmly as the defender
of legitimate business rights in a region where popular prejudice was
capable of rising to anarchistic heights of denunciation and attack.

The picture pleased him; he would scarcely have been a true descendant
of the fighting Blounts of Tennessee if the prospect of a conflict had
been other than inspiring. If there were to be no Patricia in his
f