pouter-pigeon chieftain moved that the Senate
organization be given over to him and his fellows. The motion would seem
to settle it. The vote on the floor would be equal, and the sagacious
pouter-pigeon reckoned on the new Vice-President to decide for him and
his. The party colleagues of Senator Hanway, many of them four terms old
in Senate mysteries, were eaten of despair; they saw no gateway of
escape. The pouter-pigeon would take possession, remake the committees,
and, practically speaking, thereby remake the legislation of that
Congress.

At this crisis, Senator Hanway took down the Constitution and showed by
that venerable document how the power of the Vice-President went no
farther than deciding ties on legislative questions; that when the
business at bay was a matter of Senate organization, he had no more to
say than had the last appointed messenger on the gallery doors. The
situation, in short, did not present a tie, for the settlement of which
the Vice-Presidential decision was possible; therefore, Senate things
must remain as they then were.

Senator Hanway's reading of Vice-Presidential powers was right, as even
the opposition confessed; he saved the Senate and thereby the nation to
his party, and his rule was established unchallenged over his people,
his least opinion becoming their cloud and their pillar of fire to guide
them day and night. He was made far and away the dominant figure of the
Senate.

Finding himself thus loftily situated and his hands so clothed with
power, Senator Hanway, looking over the plains of national politics,
conceived the hour ripe for another and a last step upward. For twelve
years a White House had been his dream; now he resolved to seek its
realization. From the Senate he would move to a Presidency; a double
term should close his career where Washington and Jefferson and Jackson
and other great ones of the past closed theirs.

True, Senator Hanway must win his party's nomination; and it was here he
took counsel with his Senate colleagues. Being consulted, the word of
those grave ones proved the very climax of flattery. Senators Vice and
Price and Dice and Ice, and Stuff and Bluff and Gruff and Muff, and Loot
and Coot and Hoot and Toot, and Wink and Blink and Drink and
Kink--statesmen all and of snow-capped eminence in the topography of
party--endorsed Senator Hanway's ambition without a wrinkle of distrust
to mar their brows or a moment lost in weighing the proposal. The