University of Virginia Library

18. CHAPTER XVIII.

IN an amazingly short time after these solvent
providences had befallen Weathercock John,
all the lobbyists out of Gehenna seemed to have
learned that he was “approachable.”

These turkey buzzards have a marvelous aptitude
at scenting a moral carcass, and Vane, who
did not so much as suspect that he was dead,
must have been already in need of burial, and
pungently attractive to their abominable olfactories.
They gathered around him and settled
upon him, until he might be described as fairly
black with them. Gentlemen who, to be in character,
ought to have had raw necks and a soretoed
gait, croaked into his ears every imaginable
scheme for pilfering, not only the fatness and the
life-blood, but the very bones out of Uncle Sam.
It is arithmetically certain that, had every one of
these pick-purse plans been carried out successfully,

the Secretary of the Treasury would have
had to suspend all manner of payments.

Among so many golden bows of promise,
Weathercock John was able to make a judicious
pick, and to find lots of full purses at the ends
of them. He would have nothing to do with
“national highways,” because he was already
highwaying it on the line of the Great Subfluvial,
and did not want to become known as one of the
“railroad ring.”

He selected the congenial case of a deceased
horse, who had been killed by our troops in
Western New York during the war of 1812, and
who had already drawn his ghostly claim for
damages through five Congresses, the amount
thereof quadrupling with every successive journey,
so that it had risen from $125 to $32,000.

Also he pitched upon the case of certain plantation
buildings in Florida, which had been destroyed
by the same indiscreet soldiery while
striving to defend them from the Seminoles,
or by the Seminoles while struggling to take

them from the soldiery; and which, by dint of
repeated “settlements and adjustments on principles
of justice and equity,” every settlement
being made the pretext of a new adjustment,
and every adjustment the pretext of a new settlement,
had grown in worth from about $8,000 to
about $134,000,—one of the most remarkable
instances of the rise of property ever witnessed
in a thinly settled country.

Likewise he hit upon the grievance of a mail
contractor, who, having failed to carry his mails
and so forfeited his contract, now demanded
(through his heirs) $10,000 in damages; also
$15,000 for mail services, in addition to those
not rendered; also $20,000 of increased compensation
for the mail services not rendered, together
with interest and costs to the amount of $15,000
more.

These and some dozen other similar swindles,
our member took under his legislative protection,
proposing to put them through as such little
jokers usually are put through; that is, by tacking

them on to appropriation bills at the very
end of the session. As for remuneration, he
was fair minded enough to be content with ten
per cent. on each successful claim, whereas some
unscrupulous statesmen extorted as much as fifteen
or twenty. It is needless to say that, in
view of this conscientious moderation, the lobby
itself was stricken with a sense of unholy gratitude,
and began to shout through its organs,
“Hurrah for Honest John Vane!” You may
imagine how it delighted and strengthened him
to find that, no matter what villainous trick he
played upon the public, he could not lose his
glorious nickname. So cheered was he by this
incongruous good fortune that he ventured to
introduce a little bill of his own into Congress,
appropriating $50,000 for a new cemetery for
“the heroic dead of the late war,” the contract
for the coffins to be awarded to one Elnathan
Sly, who was his own man of straw or alter ego.

Meantime he would have nothing to do with
those visionary projects which “had no money in

them.” His motto was, “No Irish need apply,”
meaning thereby indigent applicants for legislation,
or applicants who would not offer to go
snacks. When an author urged him to introduce
an international copyright bill, he cut short his
visitor's prosing about the interests of literature
by saying brusquely, “Sir, I may as well tell you
at once that I don't care anything about this
subject, and I don't believe anybody can make
me care about it.” When some simple college
professors wanted him to propose an appropriation
for the observation of an eclipse, he got rid of
the venerable Dryasdusts by a stroke of rare
humor, telling them that his specially was Revolutionary
pensions. When a wooden-legged captain
of volunteers applied to him for the Slowburgh
Post-Office, he treated him with promises,
which sent him home promptly in high spirits,
and then secured the position for one of his own
wire-pullers, a man who had enlisted for the war
in the Home Guards.

A great change, you will say; an unnaturally

sudden eclipse; an improbably complete decadence.
Not so; in his inmost being Vane had
not altered; only in the incrustations of life
deposited by surroundings. Barring the molluscous
characteristics of easy good nature, and that
sort of companionable generosity which amounts
to give and take, he had never been beneficent
and unselfish. He had not moral sympathy
enough to feel the beauty of virtue in the individual,
nor intellect enough to discover the necessity
of virtue to the prosperity of society, nor
culture enough to value any educational instrument
finer than a common school. Considering
the bare poverty of his spiritual part, indeed, our
Congressman was merely a beggar on horseback;
and it was no wonder that, once temptation got
him faced hellwards, he rode to the devil with
astonishing rapidity.

Well, John Vane fell from respectable indigence
into degradingly thrifty circumstances.
He paid all the debts which he had incurred
during his abnormal, or at least accidental, course

of honesty, and knew no more what it was to be
without a comforting roll of pilfered greenbacks
in his pocket. He hired a fine carriage for his
wife, and gave her all the funds that she needed
for entertainments and shopping, thereby arousing
in her fresh respect and affection. Indeed,
he so far satisfied the pecuniary expectations of
Olympia that she no longer found the wealthy
Ironman necessary to her happiness, and fell into
a prudent way of discouraging his attentions.
Once more our member's home was tranquil, and
he happy and glorious in the midst of it. A
man who can dazzle and fascinate his own wedded
Danäe with showers of gold is nothing less
than a Jove of a husband.

It is worth nothing that Olympia had no scruples
about using these unaccustomed riches, and never
once asked where they came from. Had she
learned that they were filched from the public
treasury, would she have accepted and spent them
the less freely? A venerable Congressman,
thoroughly versed in all the male and female

wickedness of Washington, assures me that women
are conscienceless plunderers of public property,
and will steal any official article which they
can lay hands on, from a paper-folder upward.

At last came the end of the session. As is
always the case, it was a season of wild turmoil
and uproar, by no means resembling one's idea of
legislation, but more like a dam breaking away.
The House was as frantic with excitement and
as noisy with dissonant speaking as was the tower
of Babel after the confusion of tongues. Honorable
members who had special bills to push
were particularly active and sonorous. They
spouted; they tacked on amendments; they electioneered
among their brother lawgivers; they
were incredibly greedy and shameless. An imaginative
observer might have fancied himself in
a huge mock-auction shop, with two or three
score of impudent Peter Funks hammering away
at once, while dead horses were knocked down at
a hundred times the price of live ones, and burnt
barns, empty cotton bags, rotten steamers, and

unbuilt railroads went at similar swindling prices,
the victimized purchaser in every case being a
rich simpleton called Uncle Sam. The time,
talents, and parliamentary skill of the honest
members were nearly all used up in detecting and
beading off the immortal steeds which were
turned into the national pastures by the dishonest
ones. Many measures of justice, of governmental
reform, and even of departmental necessity
were, perforce, overlooked and left untouched.
It seemed as though the only thing which Congress
was not under obligation to attend to was
the making of laws for the benefit of the whole
people.

In this raid of special legislation upon real
legislation John Vane was one of the most active
and adroit guerillas. His “genial” smile simpered
from desk to desk, like Hector's shield
blazing along the ranks of Trojan war. He had
never smiled so before; he very nearly smiled
himself sick; he proved himself the smiler of
smilers. There was no resisting such an obviously

warm-hearted fellow, especially as he was
generous, too, offering to vote as he would be
voted for. And everything prospered with him;
the taxes gathered from his countrymen melted
on his schemes like butter on hot pancakes; and
when he left the House at midnight he was a man
in “respectable circumstances.”

He now had funds enough to carry the next
nominating caucus in his district, and thus, with
Dorman's potent aid, to make fairly sure of a return
to Congress. As he had once swept the
ballot-boxes as Honest John Vane, so he purposed
to sweep them again as Dishonest John Vane.
But is the golden calf of lobbydom to be the directing
deity of our politics forever? Is no axe
to be laid to the root of this green bay tree of
Slowburgh? We shall see.