hen
they said anything humorously their enemies took it seriously. But
Congressman Mallard was safe enough there.

Being what he was--a handsome bundle of selfishness, coated over with
a fine gloss of seeming humility, a creature whose every instinct was
richly mulched in self-conceit and yet one who simulated a deep
devotion for mankind at large--he couldn't make either of these
mistakes.

Upon a time the presidential nomination of his party--the dominant
party, too--had been almost within his grasp. That made his losing it
all the more bitter. Thereafter he became an obstructionist, a fighter
outside of the lines of his own party and not within the lines of the
opposing party, a leader of the elements of national discontent and
national discord, a mouthpiece for all those who would tear down the
pillars of the temple because they dislike its present tenants. Once
he had courted popularity; presently--this coming after his
re-election to a sixth term--he went out of his way to win
unpopularity. His invectives ate in like corrosives, his metaphors bit
like adders. Always he had been like a sponge to sop up adulation; now
he was to prove that when it came to withstanding denunciation his
hide was the hide of a rhino.

This war came along, and after more than two years of it came our
entry into it. For the most part, in the national capital and out of
it, artificial lines of partisan division were wiped out under a tidal
wave of patriotism. So far as the generality of Americans were
concerned, they for the time being were neither Democrats nor
Republicans; neither were they Socialists nor Independents nor
Prohibitionists. For the duration of the war they were Americans,
actuated by a common purpose and stirred by a common danger. Afterward
they might be, politically speaking, whatever they chose to be, but
for the time being they were just Americans. Into this unique
condition Jason Mallard projected himself, an upstanding reef of
opposition to break the fine continuity of a mighty ground swell of
national unity and national harmony.

Brilliant, formidable, resourceful, seemingly invulnerable, armoured
in apparent disdain for the contempt and the indignation of the masses
of the citizenship, he fought against and voted against the breaking
off of diplomatic relations with Germany; fought against the draft,
fought against the war appropriations, fought against the plans for a
bigger navy, the plans for a great army;