sequently its rebels against current
convictions. In the older countries he had imagined that it might be
possible to hold with the hare and run with the hounds; but in the land
of opportunity for all there was less reason to be astonished when the
hunted turned at last into the hunter. Where every boy was taught that
he might some day be President, why should one stand amazed when the
ambitious son of a circus rider became Governor of Virginia? After all,
a fair field and no favours was the best that the most conservative of
politicians--the best that even John Benham could ask.

Yes, there was a cause, there was a reason for the miracle of disorder,
or it would not have happened. The hour had called forth the man; but
the man had been there awaiting the strokes, listening, listening, with
his ear to the wind. It had been a triumph of personality, one of those
rare dramatic occasions when the right man and the appointed time come
together. This the young man admitted candidly in the very moment when
he told himself that he detested the demagogue and all his works. A man
who consistently made his bid for the support of the radical element!
Who stirred up the forces of discontent because he could harness them
to his chariot! A man who was born in a circus tent, and who still
performed in public the tricks of a mountebank! That this man had power,
Stephen granted ungrudgingly; but it was power over the undisciplined,
the half-educated, the mentally untrained. It was power, as John Benham
had once remarked with a touch of hyperbole, over empty stomachs.

There were persons in Stephen's intimate circle (there are such persons
even in the most conservative communities) who contended that Vetch was
in his way a rude genius. Judge Horatio Lancaster Page, for instance,
insisted that the Governor had a charm of his own, that, "he wasn't half
bad to look at if you caught him smiling," that he could even reason
"like one of us," if you granted him his premise. After the open debate
between Vetch and Benham--the great John Benham, hero of war and peace,
and tireless labourer in the vineyard of public service--after this
memorable discussion, Judge Horatio Lancaster Page had remarked, in his
mild, unpolemical tone, that "though John had undoubtedly carried off
the flowers of rhetoric, there was a good deal of wholesome green stuff
about that fellow Vetch." But everybody knew that a man with a comical
habit of mind could not be right