ad managed to keep in
control. For the remaining million, divided between twelve small
cities and an agricultural population, he had small respect. What did
this handful of yokels amount to, anyhow?--dull, frivoling,
barn-dancing boors.

The great state of Illinois--a territory as large as England proper and
as fertile as Egypt, bordered by a great lake and a vast river, and
with a population of over two million free-born Americans--would
scarcely seem a fit subject for corporate manipulation and control.
Yet a more trade-ridden commonwealth might not have been found anywhere
at this time within the entire length and breadth of the universe.
Cowperwood personally, though contemptuous of the bucolic mass when
regarded as individuals, had always been impressed by this great
community of his election. Here had come Marquette and Joliet, La
Salle and Hennepin, dreaming a way to the Pacific. Here Lincoln and
Douglas, antagonist and protagonist of slavery argument, had contested;
here had arisen "Joe" Smith, propagator of that strange American dogma
of the Latter-Day Saints. What a state, Cowperwood sometimes thought;
what a figment of the brain, and yet how wonderful! He had crossed it
often on his way to St. Louis, to Memphis, to Denver, and had been
touched by its very simplicity--the small, new wooden towns, so
redolent of American tradition, prejudice, force, and illusion. The
white-steepled church, the lawn-faced, tree-shaded village streets, the
long stretches of flat, open country where corn grew in serried rows or
where in winter the snow bedded lightly--it all reminded him a little
of his own father and mother, who had been in many respects suited to
such a world as this. Yet none the less did he hesitate to press on
the measure which was to adjust his own future, to make profitable his
issue of two hundred million dollars' worth of Union Traction, to
secure him a fixed place in the financial oligarchy of America and of
the world.

The state legislature at this time was ruled over by a small group of
wire-pulling, pettifogging, corporation-controlled individuals who came
up from the respective towns, counties, and cities of the state, but
who bore the same relation to the communities which they represented
and to their superiors and equals in and out of the legislative halls
at Springfield that men do to such allies anywhere in any given field.
Why do we call them pettifogging and dismiss them? Perhaps they