After all, it is your victory."

I protested.

"Then _ours_," said he. "Yours, for us."

XVII

SCARBOROUGH

Now came _the_ problem--to elect.

We hear much of many wonders of combination and concentration of
_industrial_ power which railway and telegraph have wrought. But nothing
is said about what seems to me the greatest wonder of them all--how
these forces have resulted in the concentration of the _political_ power
of upwards of twelve millions of our fifteen million voters; how the few
can impose their ideas and their will upon widening circles, out and
out, until all are included. The people are scattered; the powers
confer, man to man, day by day. The people are divided by partizan and
other prejudices; the powers are bound together by the one
self-interest. The people must accept such political organizations as
are provided for them; the powers pay for, and their agents make and
direct, those organizations. The people are poor; the powers are rich.
The people have not even offices to bestow; the powers have offices to
give and lucrative employment of all kinds, and material and social
advancement,--everything that the vanity or the appetite of man craves.
The people punish but feebly--usually the wrong persons--and soon
forget; the powers relentlessly and surely pursue those who oppose them,
forgive only after the offender has surrendered unconditionally, and
they never forget where it is to their interest to remember. The powers
know both what they want and how to get it; the people know neither.

Back in March, when Goodrich first suspected that I had outgeneraled
him, he opened negotiations with the national machine of the opposition
party. He decided that, if I should succeed in nominating Burbank, he
would save his masters and himself by nominating as the opposition
candidate a man under their and his control, and by electing him with an
enormous campaign fund.

Beckett, the subtlest and most influential of the managers of the
national machine of the opposition party, submitted several names to
him. He selected Henry J. Simpson, Justice of the Supreme Court of
Ohio--a slow, shy, ultra-conservative man, his brain spun full in every
cell with the cobwebs of legal technicality. He was, in his way, almost
as satisfactory a candidate for the interests as Cromwell would have
been. For, while he was honest, of what value is honesty when combined
with credulity and lack of knowledge of affairs? The