“I tell you,” thundered Clive, beside himself with excitement, “we have got to act—and to act _now_. I tell you that the people of this State, irrespective of party, are waiting for half a chance to throw off the yoke of the railroad—of the Machine. All over this country of ours bosses are being overthrown. They are going down to ruin in the wreckage of their own Machines; and it is the PEOPLE who are downing them. The day of Bossism is passing—passing forever. We came into this convention as free men. _Some_ of us did. And I for one propose to walk out of it a free man. If we go before the people of this State on the issue of honest government as opposed to dishonesty, I tell you that we will _win_. It only needs a man with a match, and the nerve to use that match, to start a conflagration that will burn party ties to cinders and leave a free, emancipated people. “Let them call me bolter, if they will! Let them call me traitor, ingrate, renegade! I would rather be a bolter than a thief. I would rather rip my party, dearly as I love it, to rags and tatters, than to sacrifice my own self-respect any longer! I would rather see the Democratic party pass from existence altogether than to see it continue the tool and the creature of greed and dishonesty. “Yes, they may call me bolter, and properly so, for I am going to bolt this convention! Is there a man who will follow me out of doors? Out of the filthy atmosphere of this Machine-ridden, Boss-owned convention, into the pure sunshine of God’s own people?” In the midst of an indescribable tumult, in which hisses and cheers were madly intermingled, Clive Standish leaped off the platform, cleared the orchestra railing and strode up the middle aisle toward the open door at the far end of the hall. And then a strange thing occurred. Karl Ansel, as a man wakened from a dream, rubbed his eyes, and peered for a moment at Clive’s retreating back. Then with a yell that shook the rafters he, too, bounded over the rail and hastened up the aisle behind his leader. The delegates from Wills and Matawan counties arose as one man, forming in procession behind Ansel and Standish. Down the steps from the gallery came not one, nor a dozen, but nine-tenths of those who had heard the speech, including the very cream of the representative business element of Granite. The remarkable scene was over in almost less than it takes to tell of it. In a daze sat the abandoned convention. Glancing about them, even the Conover delegates on the floor discovered here and there vacant chairs, gaps in their own solid ranks, where some one, weaker perhaps than the others—or perhaps stronger—had been moved by the furious oratory of Clive Standish to join that procession which even now was rolling out of the front door into the quiet, gaslit street like a living avalanche.