University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.

“HONEST, able old fellow, that Sharp,” observed
Dorman, as soon as the Whetstone
patriot had fairly bowed and smirked himself out
of the house. “Glad he happened to drop in on
you while I was here.”

“See here, Darius!” broke out Vane, still Honest
John Vane, proud of his noble sobriquet and
resolved to hold fast to it. “I'm not going to go
for a bill merely because there's money in it, and
some of that money offers to come my way.
That ain't my style.”

“I know it is n't,” conceded Dorman, bowing
humbly to this tempest of integrity and honorable
self-esteem, probably for the sake of weathering
it sooner.

“Then what do you offer me cheap stock for,
and corner lots at a nominal figger, and all that
sort of thing, to get me to vote your loan? Don't

you know and don't I know that you are trying
to bribe me?”

“You take your risk, don't you?” argued the
man of affairs. “I don't offer you money, but
merely a business risk.”

“What risk is there when the government is to
construct the road, and to give it such a credit
that the stock can't help selling? You might as
well talk about the risk of taking United States
bonds at half the market value. You can't fool
me that way, old boy. I'm a business man myself.
I see as plainly as you do that the Great
Subfluvial is to be built at the expense of the
Treasury for the benefit of directors and officers
and boss stockholders, who will take the shares
at fifty, say, and sell them out at par, and then
leave the whole thing on the hands of the small investors
and Uncle Sam. That's what you fellows
mean to do, and want me to help you do. I don't
see it.”

“John Vane, if you are really honest John
Vane, you'll allow that one good turn deserves
another,” insinuated Dorman.

“I know you think you put me here,” replied
Vane, who already began to feel the oats on
which Congressmen feed, and to attribute to his
own mettle his advancement from the position of
“wheel-horse” to that of “leader.” “You did say
a word in season for me at the caucus: I own it.
But proposing is one thing, and getting the nomination
is another, and carrying the election is a
third. Could you have shoved through any other
man? Why didn't you try it? You saw what
horse could win the race, and you bet on it. It
was the name of Honest John Vane,—the man of
the plain people,—the self-made man,—that's what
took the caucus and the ballot-boxes. And now
you want me to throw all those claims to respect
and power overboard; want me to stop being
honest and to tax the plain people uselessly;
want me to go back on myself and my best
friends; want me to follow in Bummer's dirty
trail. Suppose I should do it? Why, I should
end like Bummer; I should be laid on the shelf.
O, I'm not ungrateful for what you did toward

the nomination! I'll do anything in reason for
you, old boy,—get you a collectorship or postmastership,
anything that'll bear telling of. But
I won't help plunder the Treasury of forty millions,
and the stock-buying public of twice as
much more, merely to give you a hundred thousand
and myself five thousand. I tell you
squarely, and you may as well understand it first
as last, that I wont go into your lobbying.”

“Why, this is the way everything works here,”
the lobbyist (for such he was) at last asserted in
his desperation. “Bills of this sort slide through
every year. Some are upset, but who upsets
them? Fellows who haven't been retained, or
who have rival bills to push. I tell you, John
Vane, that more than half your brother patriots
in the Capital do something in this line. The
main work of Congress is done out of sight, like
that of a mole, or by Beelzebub! any other underground
creature. Making such laws as are
needed, and voting such appropriations as the departments
demand, wouldn't worry through a ten

day's session. The real business of your legislators
is running party politics, clearing scores with
your fuglemen, protecting vested interests which
can pay for it, voting relief bills for a percentage
on the relief, and subsidizing great schemes for a
share of the subsidy. A good Congressman of
the present day is the silent partner of every job
that he supports. That's what I meant by financial
legislation when I urged you to go into it.
Don't be an old-fashioned dog-in-the-manger,
John Vane. Go with the crowd and humor the
crowd; let others have their fodder, and bite in
yourself. Look at the rafts of patriot statesmen
who drive their carriages and keep open house.
Do you suppose they do it off their salaries?
Then why can't you do it off your salary, instead
of huddling into these two little rooms and traveling
by horse-car? Is it because they know how
to make money go further than you do? No, sir!
They take their little stock in a good bill, and
then put it through. It's the common thing in
Washington, and it's got to be the correct thing.
And you can't change it. There's a boiler inside
this boat which will make the wheels turn round,
no matter who tries to hold 'em. As long as
there is special legislation, there will be money to
be made by it, and legislators will take their share.
When a rich financier or monopolist comes to
a poor M. C., and whispers to him, I want a
chance to pocket a million, is the M. C. to say,
Pocket it, and be sure not to give me any? Will
he, as your human nature averages, will he say it?
No, sir! he says, Let me have a percentage; and
I assert that he's right. It's the natural working
of humanity, under the circumstances. The only
thing I wonder at is, that Congressmen are content
with so little. Most of 'em ain't bold and
hearty at all. They are pusillanimously half
honest. Come, Vane, I want you to do well in
the world of politics, and I want you to begin by
supporting the Great Subfluvial.”

“Dorman, I have the greatest mind in the world
to expose you,” was the almost heroic response of
honest John.

“I should contradict and disapprove every word
of your exposure,” laughed the unabashed lobbyist.
“Do you suppose Congress wants subsidy
legislation ripped open and exhibited to the public?
Congress would believe you and would appoint
a committee of investigation, and then
would hush the matter up. Wait till you have
learned your business, and then call me a liar, if
you can.”

And so the interview ended, with virtue still
unshaken, but vice undiscouraged. Darius Dorman
was too familiar with his evil trade and with
the society in which it had hitherto prospered, to
despair of finally leading his representative up to
the manger of corruption. He narrated the substance
of the above dialogue to the Honorable
Simon Sharp with spasmodic twinges of cheerless
gayety which resembled the “cracked and
thin laughter heard far down in Hell.”

“It is ludicrous, I must confess, Mr. Dorman,”
sighed the representative of the old Whetstone
State, with a sad shake of his venerable long

head; “but painfully so. I'm afraid that your
friend won't come to much in Congress. He
won't be a practical statesman. No head for
finance.”

“Don't give way to despondency about him, my
benevolent creature,” answered Darius, shaking
all over with his dolorous mirth, his very raiment,
indeed, quivering and undulating with it, so that
it seemed as if there might be a twitching tail inside
his trousers. “I have looked into the very
bottom of John Vane's thimbleful of soul. I
know every sort and fashion of man that he will
make up into, under the scissoring of diverse circumstances.
John has no character of his own.
He has had neither the born twist nor the education
to give him one. He is a chameleon. He
takes the color of the people about him. If his
constituents ever find him out, they won't call
him Honest John Vane, but Weathercock John.
He went straight in Slowburgh, because most
folks in Slowburgh go straight. After he has
been long enough in Congress he will be like the

mass of Congressmen. The furnace of special
legislation and the bellows of Washington opinion
will melt him over. Don't be anxious about him;
it is a mere matter of time. He is pious, I grant;
but so are you, Friend Sharp; so are lots more
who live by subsidy bills. It's of no use to be
inside religion when you are also inside politics,
as politics now go. Yes, it is of use; it varnishes
the politics over nicely; it makes the special
legislation look decent. John will be a great help
to us, his reputation is so good. We must keep
going for him, and we shall finally fetch him.
When he finds that the majority take stock in
bills, when he fairly realizes that he must choose
between failing as a watchdog of the Treasury
and succeeding as lapdog of the lobby, he will go
for the spoils solid, or at least vote a split ticket.
I'll bet on bringing him over; I'll bet my eternal
happiness on it!” he laughed, as though the
article in question were not much to risk.

“You are a very plain-spoken person, Mr. Dorman,”
observed the Honorable Sharp, pulling a

decorously long face. “Just a little—well, let us
say eccentric, in your expressions,” he added with
his obsequious smile. “However, to come to the
substance of what you tell me, I must admit that
it is encouraging. You really cheer me, Mr. Dorman.
I thank you kindly.”

Well, we have described the first Washingtonian
temptation which stole to the side and
whispered in the ear of Honest John Vane. Of
course it was not the last; the goblins of the
Mammonite crew dropped in upon him from week
to week and almost from day to day; he could
hardly put out his hands without feeling the
pocket of a ring or corporation gaping to receive
them. If he accepted an invitation to a supper,
he found that it was given by some subsidy or relief
bill. If a gentleman offered him a cigar, he
discovered that it was scented with appropriations.
If he helped a pretty woman into a street car,
she asked him to vote for her statue or her father's
claim.

The lobby proved to be every way more imposing

and potent than he had imagined it. True,
some of its representatives were men whom it
was easy for him to snub,—men of unwholesome
skins, greasy garments, brutish manners, filthy
minds, and sickening conversation; men who so
reeked and drizzled with henbane tobacco and
cockatrice whiskey that a moderate drinker or
smoker would recoil from them as from a cesspool;
men whose stupid, shameless boastings of
their briberies were enough to warn away from
them all but the very elect of Satan. But there
were other corruptionists whom he could not
steel himself to treat rudely. There were former
members of Congress whose names had been
trumpeted to him by fame in his youthful days;
decayed statesmen, who were now, indeed, nothing
but unfragrant corpses, breeding all manner
of moral vermin and miasma, but who still had
the speech of patriotism on their lips and the
power to argue speciously about the “needs of
the country.” There were dashing Brummels,
who seemed to him much finer gentlemen than
himself, asserting a high position in society,
wearing fine raiment elegantly, brilliant in conversation,
gracious in manner, and stately in port.
There were soldiers of the late war, bearing titles
which made his civilian history appear mean, and
boasting of services which seemed to crown them
with a halo of patriotism.

Hardest of all for a novice in public affairs to
face, there were pundits in constitutional law and
Congressional precedent, whose deluges of political
lore overflowed him like a river, and stranded
him promptly on lone islands of silence. Then
there were highly salaried and quick-witted agents
of great business houses, which he, as a business
man, knew, respected, and perhaps feared. Now
and then, too, there was a woman, audacious and
clever and stylish and handsome,—an Aspasia
who was willing to promise money, and able to
redeem her promises in beauty. Indeed, it sometimes
seemed to John Vane that the lobby was a
cleverer and more formidable assemblage than
either of those two chambers which nominally

gave laws to the nation. More and more distinctly,
as the session went on, he realized that
his honesty would have a hard fight of it, and
that if he succeeded in keeping it from being
borne to the ground, he would grandly deserve to
wear his cherished sobriquet.