th? We
would better be unrepresented in Congress than misrepresented, and I ask
you, gentlemen," turning again to the legislators, "if you are going to
vote again as you did in the last ballot, and allow a sick man to cast
his vote for Robert Burroughs and thus elect him? I know," he added with
impressive slowness, "whereof I speak! That we are Democrats or
Republicans, Labor or Fusion, should not figure in this contest.
Instead, each man should consider whether we, a young State, shall enter
Washington tarred with the ineradicable pitch of bribery or shall we
send a man who will show the elder States that Montana is proud of her
newly acquired statehood, and that no star in the Northwest firmament
shines more pure?

"To those who have allowed themselves in this fiery ordeal to swerve
from their duty to their State, through the temptation of personal gain,
let me say that they will be branded and dishonored, despised at home
and abroad; that they will be political pariahs forever, unless they
reconsider their votes while yet there is time. They have been clay,
moulded on the potter's wheel of the political manipulator behind whom
the leading candidate has worked his nefarious will. Because a man is
rich shall we condone his base acts? A poor man is as likely to commit
crime as a rich one; but he would do so for very different reasons. The
rich man in politics, sins for his own self-gratification; the poor man,
to better himself or his family, often not comprehending the enormity of
his crime.

"So long as I possess the faculties of a man, I purpose to fight against
the election of Robert Burroughs to a seat in Congress. I do not want it
said that I was a State senator in a Legislature which seated a man so
notoriously lost to a sense of political decency as he. I would rather
go back to the Whoop Up Country to spend my days in toil and obscurity,
and be able to hold up my head and look the world in the face."

For a moment he paused. The awed, sullen, furious faces before him
seemed individually seared on his soul as he swept the crowded room.
Many a man sat in a cold sweat of fear, with haunted eyes and compressed
lips that proclaimed his guilt with deadly certainty.

For the first time Philip became aware that his sister was present, and
had heard his denunciation of her husband. But it was too late to
retract, and he would not if he could. Truth-telling, like the
cauterizing of the snake's bite, must sometimes be