The Guardian did not get its share of the $500-or-more educational advertising from the P.-U. Indeed, there was no educational advertising. The transfer issue was passed, for the time, rather than venture into the open where, as Judge Dana observed, “The Guardian was waiting for it with a fish-horn and a brick”; and the P.-U.’s legal lights set about drafting a blanket franchise for the consideration of some future legislature, which should enable the corporation to do about what it pleased without reference to dubious councils or pestilent journalistic demagogues. CHAPTER VII CRYSTALLIZING politics left but two figures in the field for the campaign of 1913. That Martin Embree would carry the radical banner was a foregone conclusion. Magnus Laurens was logically the man to oppose him. To the Clark-Wanser-Dana wing of the party, who owned the then Governor, a weak-kneed, feeble-spirited, oratorical creature, Laurens was distasteful. He was far more prone to give orders than to take them. But on fundamental issues he was “right”; a sound conservative, reliably hostile to all the quasi-socialistic theories threatening the control of the State. Moreover his personal and political rectitude was beyond suspicion. Like or dislike him, he was the only man in sight with a chance of beating Embree. Meantime “Deutschtum,” that world-wide, subterranean propaganda of German influence, German culture, German hopes and ambitions and future dominations which had for a quarter of a century established itself reproductively as the ichneumon parasite affixes its eggs to the body of the helpless host which, later, their brood will prey upon and destroy--Deutschtum was scheming out the peaceable and subtle conquest of Centralia through capture of the minds of the coming generations of citizens. The Cultural Language Bill was quite harmless in appearance, so astutely had it been drawn. Under pretense of giving parents of public school pupils the right to secure for their children, by petition, instruction in foreign languages, it actually established German as a “preferred study” with the heaviest ratio of credits, and, in the advanced schools, as practically a compulsory subject. This meant the addition of some four to five hundred teachers of German throughout the State, every one of whom would be a propagandist of Deutschtum. As a side issue, the determination of the textbooks on European history was left to the German staff. The school boards of the State being already pretty well Teutonized, it was evident that, should the bill pass, history as taught in the Centralia school system would be censored agreeably to the purposes of His Imperial Majesty Wilhelm of Germany.