n coincidence, though I think not, that, a few days after
Fessenden's call, a Reform movement against Dominick appeared upon the
surface of Jackson County politics. I thought, at the time, that it was
the first streak of the dawn I had been watching for,--the awakening of
the sluggish moral sentiment of the rank and file of the voters. I know
now that it was merely the result of a quarrel among the corporations
that employed Dominick. He had been giving the largest of them,
Roebuck's Universal Gas and Electric Company, called the Power Trust,
more than its proportional share of the privileges and spoils. The
others had protested in vain, and as a last resort had ordered their
lawyers to organize a movement to "purify" Jackson County, Dominick's
stronghold.

I did not then know it, but I got the nomination for county prosecutor
chiefly because none of the other lawyers, not even those secretly
directing the Reform campaign, was brave enough publicly to provoke the
Power Trust. I made a house to house, farm to farm, man to man, canvass.
We had the secret ballot, and I was elected. The people rarely fail to
respond to that kind of appeal if they are convinced that response can
not possibly hurt, and may help, their pockets. And, by the way, those
occasional responses, significant neither of morality nor of
intelligence, lead political theorists far astray. As if honor or
honesty could win other than sporadic and more or less hypocritical
homage--practical homage, I mean--among a people whose permanent ideal
is wealth, no matter how got or how used. That is another way of saying
that the chief characteristic of Americans is that we are human and,
whatever we may profess, cherish the human ideal universal in a world
where want is man's wickedest enemy and wealth his most winning friend.
But as I was relating, I was elected, and my majority, on the face of
the returns, was between ten and eleven hundred. It must actually have
been many thousands, for never before had Dominick "doctored" the tally
sheets so recklessly.

Financially I was now on my way to the surface. I supposed that I had
become a political personage also. Was I not in possession of the most
powerful office in the county? I was astonished that neither Dominick
nor any other member of his gang made the slightest effort to conciliate
me between election day and the date of my taking office. I did succeed
in forcing from reluctant grand juries indictments agains