who had owned a slave!

This purple opposition did not surprise the astute Patrick Henry Hanway;
it had been foreseen, and he met it with prompt money. He had made his
alliances with divers railway corporations and other big companies, and
set in to overturn that feudalism in politics which had theretofore been
dominant. The aristocrats felt the attack upon their caste; they came
forth for that issue and the war wagged.

But the war was unequal. The aristocrats, who, like the Bourbons, had
learned nothing, forgotten nothing, plodded with horseback saddle-bag
politics. Patrick Henry Hanway met them with modern methods of telegraph
and steam. Right and left he sowed his gold among the peasantry. In the
end he went over his noble enemies like a train of cars and his
legislature sent him into Washington by a vote of three to one. He had
been there now twelve years and was just entering upon his third term.
Moreover, he had fortified his position; his enemies were now powerless
to do him harm; and at the time this story finds him he had constructed
a machine which rendered his hold upon his State as unshakable as
Gibraltar's famous rock. Patrick Henry Hanway might now be Senator for
what space he pleased, and nothing left for that opposing nobility but
to glare in helpless rancor and digest its spleen.

When Patrick Henry Hanway came to Washington he was unhampered of even a
shadow of concern for any public good. His sole thought was himself; his
patriotism, if he ever possessed any, had perished long before. Some
said that its feeble wick went flickering out in those earlier hours of
civil war. Patrick Henry Hanway, rather from a blind impression of
possible pillage than any eagerness to uphold a Union which seemed
toppling to its fall, enlisted for ninety days. As he plowed through
rain and mud on the painful occasion of a night march, he addressed the
man on his right in these remarkable words:

"Bill, this is the last d----d time I'll ever love a country!"

And it was.

The expletive, however, marked how deep dwelt the determination of
Patrick Henry Hanway; for even as a young man he had taught himself a
suave and cautious conversation, avoiding profanity as of those lingual
vices that never made and sometimes lost a dollar.

The Senate of this republic, at the time when Patrick Henry Hanway was
given his seat therein, was a thing of granite and ice to all newcomers.
The oldsters took no more notice of the novice