keen a drilling in statecraft--its subtleties and
ramifications. The president of the senate and the speaker of the
house were singled out and warned separately as to their duty. A page
a day devoted to legislative proceeding in this quarter was practically
the custom of the situation. Cowperwood was here personally on the
scene, brazen, defiant, logical, the courage of his convictions in his
eyes, the power of his magnetism fairly enslaving men. Throwing off
the mask of disinterestedness--if any might be said to have covered
him--he now frankly came out in the open and, journeying to
Springfield, took quarters at the principal hotel. Like a general in
time of battle, he marshaled his forces about him. In the warm,
moonlit atmosphere of June nights when the streets of Springfield were
quiet, the great plain of Illinois bathed for hundreds of miles from
north to south in a sweet effulgence and the rurals slumbering in their
simple homes, he sat conferring with his lawyers and legislative agents.

Pity in such a crisis the poor country-jake legislator torn between his
desire for a justifiable and expedient gain and his fear lest he should
be assailed as a betrayer of the people's interests. To some of these
small-town legislators, who had never seen as much as two thousand
dollars in cash in all their days, the problem was soul-racking. Men
gathered in private rooms and hotel parlors to discuss it. They stood
in their rooms at night and thought about it alone. The sight of big
business compelling its desires the while the people went begging was
destructive. Many a romantic, illusioned, idealistic young country
editor, lawyer, or statesman was here made over into a minor cynic or
bribe-taker. Men were robbed of every vestige of faith or even of
charity; they came to feel, perforce, that there was nothing outside
the capacity for taking and keeping. The surface might appear
commonplace--ordinary men of the state of Illinois going here and
there--simple farmers and small-town senators and representatives
conferring and meditating and wondering what they could do--yet a
jungle-like complexity was present, a dark, rank growth of horrific but
avid life--life at the full, life knife in hand, life blazing with
courage and dripping at the jaws with hunger.

However, because of the terrific uproar the more cautious legislators
were by degrees becoming fearful. Friends in their home towns, at the
instigation of the p