eff
went home sore at heart; but when he had plucked up hope again out of
his sense of the ironies of things, he went back and saw the same men
and hammered at them. He explained, with a categorical clearness, that
he knew the West couldn't throw over the East now she'd taken it aboard.
Perhaps we'd got to learn our lesson from it. Just as it might be it
could learn something from us; and since it was here in our precincts,
it had got to learn. We couldn't do our new citizens the deadly wrong of
allowing the seeds of anarchy to be planted in them before they even got
over the effects of the voyage. If there were any virtue left in the
republic, the fair ideal of it should be stamped upon them as they came,
before they were taught to riot over the rights no man on earth could
have unless men are going to fight out the old brute battle for bare
supremacy.

Then one day a man said to him, "Oh, you're an idealist!" and all his
antagonists breathed more freely because they had a catchword. They
looked at him, illuminated, and repeated it.

One man, a big coal dealer down by the wharves, did more or less agree
with him.

"It's this damned immigration," he said. "They make stump speeches and
talk about the open door, but they don't know enough to shut the door
when the shebang's full."

It was the first pat retort of any sort Jeff had got.

"I'm not going back so far as that," he leaped at the chance of
answering. "I don't want to wait for legislation to crawl along and shut
the stable door. I only say, we've invited in a lot of foreigners. We've
got to teach 'em to be citizens. They've got to take the country on our
plan, and be one of us."

But the coal man had tipped back in his chair against the coal shed and
was scraping his nails with his pocket knife. He did it with exquisite
care, and his half-closed eyes had a look of sleepy contentment; he
might have been shaping a peaceful destiny. His glimmer of
responsiveness had died.

"I don't know what you're goin' to do about it," he said.

"We're going to put in a decent man for mayor," said Jeff. "And we're
going to keep Weedon Moore out."

"Moore ain't no good," said the coal man. "But I dunno's he'd do any
harm."

The eyes of them all were holden, Jeff thought. They were prisoners to
their own greed and their own stupidity. So he sat down and ran them
into his book, as blind custodians of the public weal. His book was
being written fast. He hardly knew what k