ole people defended."

"Heah! heah!" cheered Enderby.

Bridges bristled with anger, and went off into a long harangue on States
rights and the dangers of centralization, to which Enderby replied: "Bosh!
the whole trouble with your bally Government is its lack of cohesion. If I
had my way, I'd wipe out the Senate and put a strong man like Roosevelt at
the head of the executive. You're such blooming asses over here; you don't
know enough to keep a really big man in your presidential chair. This
fussing about every four years to put in some oily corporation lawyer is
bloody rot. Here's Roosevelt gets in the midst of a lot of the finest kind
of reforms, y' know, and directly you go and turn him out! Then if you get
a bad man, you've to wait four years till you can fetch him a whack. Why
not arrange it so you can pitch your President out the minute he goes
wrong? I say your old rag of a Constitution is a ball-and-chain on your
national leg. England is immeasurably better off so far as that goes."

Ross turned to Virginia, leaving the political discussion to go on over
his head. "I was back in the Old Island a couple of years ago, and you've
no idea how small it seemed to me. It surely is a 'right little, tight
little island.' I couldn't help wondering whether the men in Parliament
were as important as they seemed to think they were, and whether England
is not really an empty shell of empire, a memory of what it once was. I
couldn't settle down there, someway. I was homesick for the mountains in a
month. But what scared me most was the pauper population of the old
place--one in every thirty-seven must be helped. I came back to the States
gladly. 'I guess I'm an American,' I said to my sisters."

To Lee Virginia all this talk of "the curse of democracy" and "the decay
of empire" was unexciting, but when Cavanagh told of the sheepmen's
advance across the dead-line on Deer Creek, and of the threats of the
cattle-owners, she was better able to follow the discussion. Bridges was
heartily on the side of law and order, for he wished to boom the State
(being a heavy owner in a town-site), but he objected to Redfield's ideas
of "bottling up the resources of the State."

"We're not," retorted Redfield; "we're merely defending them against those
who would monopolize them. We believe in their fullest use, but we see no
reason for giving away the resources when the country needs the revenue."

Mrs. Redfield rose as soon as the coffee