ogether. Before he gave his final revision to the
printers, he submitted a proof to the Boss, who returned it with the
comment that his intellect was of an order quite too everyday to
criticise a project obviously framed for the millennium. From the man
reputed to own the Legislature, whose committees, certainly, were cut
and dried in his office weeks before it met, this sarcasm was gloomily
prophetic; but since his Tuscarora speech, Shelby had personally
sounded many senators, assemblymen, and representatives of the several
canal interests, and he was not dismayed.

The reception given by the newspapers to what they styled "The
Governor's Splendid Dream" heartened Shelby, though he deprecated its
form. He insisted that the scheme was no more his than the
committee's, whose elaborate report he submitted with his message, and
that it was no dream at all, but the businesslike remedy for an
admitted ill. As in De Witt Clinton's case, however, the public
brushed aside the idle question of genesis, and honored the untiring
advocate.

There were plenty who agreed with the governor. Famous economic
experts and civil service reformers wrote their approval, great
financiers wired congratulations, and the public hearings on the bills
embodying his ideas, which friendly legislators shortly introduced,
were attended by representatives from the exchanges, boards of trade,
merchants' associations, and chambers of commerce of every city
directly concerned.

A reporter remarked upon this striking showing to the Boss.

"Yes," said the great man, "the governor seems to have the unanimous
support of the college professors and the New Yorkers who claim
residence in Newport, Rhode Island; but I wonder what the taxpayer
thinks."

This figurative taxpayer personified for him the rural vote whose
strength was his strength, and whose thought he made his own. He was
hearkening to the murmur of the counties which the canal did not touch,
but whose memory of its flagrant abuses was long, and the conclusion
that he reached the country newspapers of his system began speedily to
express. One editor bewailed the "Hundred-Million-Dollar-Millstone"
which the governor proposed to hang about the people's neck; another
attacked the consistency of the man who would to-day scatter like a
prodigal what he had scrimped yesterday to save; while a third
pertinently inquired whether such a spendthrift were fit timber to put
in Washington as a check