ed--for the leaders wished nothing more ardently than his
downfall--and whether or not it was to be justified by history, it must
ever remain to his credit that he had hypnotized his countrymen through
the higher channels of their nature. The reaction might be bitter, but
memory is short, and at least he had served to demonstrate that the
American mind was not materialized by the lust of gain, was quite as
susceptible to the loftier patriotic promptings as in the days of its
revolutionary and simpler ancestors. A man like Colton might delude for
a time, for the Democratic party was deplorably weak in leaders, and the
Republican bosses, in California, as elsewhere, had made the State a
byword for shameless corruption; and their iron heel ground hard even in
that land of climate and plenty. Colton might be useful to rouse
Californians to a sense of their wrongs and opportunities, but Gwynne
doubted if he could hold them. He promised too much. The time would come
when they would turn to a strong man who talked less and did more, who
gradually imbued them with the conviction of absolute honesty,
distinguished ability, and as much disinterestedness as it is reasonable
to expect of any mortal striving for the great prizes of life.

One day there was a mass-meeting suddenly called to express sympathy
with the orange growers of the South, who had dumped twelve carloads of
early oranges into the San Francisco Bay rather than submit to the
increased rates of the transcontinental railroads. Gwynne saw his
opportunity and summoned his powers. There was a moment of doubt, of
hesitancy, of reflection that he was rusty, and that the subject was of
no special interest to him; then, at the eager insistence of Colton, he
walked rapidly to the front of the platform with all the actor's exalted
nervous delight in a new role. In a few moments there was no subject on
earth so interesting to him as the iniquities of the railroads and the
wrongs of the orange growers; he awoke from his torpor so triumphantly
that his amazed audience, as of old, felt the deep flattery of its
power over him, and he made a speech which was like the rushing of risen
waters through a broken dam. Not that he permitted himself to be carried
away wholly; he deliberately refrained from indiscriminate phillipics,
from rousing their ire too far, grasped the opportunity to see what
could be done by appealing to their reason through their higher
emotions, and begged them to