My friend the whip told me the story as a curious and somewhat confusing flaw in his theory that every man is for sale,--“most of them damned cheap,” he said,--and he thought it might make a plot for a story; like many men I have known he was incorrigibly romantic, and was always giving me plots for stories. Well, they failed to pass the bill over the Governor’s veto, and it was not long until another story was pretty well known in Illinois, about that Governor who that night was sitting up over in the executive mansion, awaiting the action of the general assembly. The story was that a large quantity of the bonds of the gas company had been placed at his disposal in a security vault in Chicago, in a box to which a man was to deliver him the key; all he had to do was to go take the bonds--and permit the bill to become a law. His answer, of course, was the veto--an offense as unpardonable as the pardoning of the anarchists; and no doubt many such offenses against the invisible power in the land were more potent in bringing down on his head that awful hatred than his mercy had been--though this was made to serve as reason for the hatred. Privilege, of course, hates mercy, too. The old Egyptian went back home, and I have always hoped that he found a better job than he went to seek in the harvest-fields, and that he did not die at last to the poorhouse; but he was never heard of more, and it was not long until the Governor was driven from his office amid the hoots and jeers and the hissing of a venomous hatred such as nothing but political rancor knows, unless it be religious rancor. Yes, politics had got pretty low in those days, and its utter meanness, gradually revealed, was enough to cause one to despair of his country and his kind. Perhaps the old Egyptian in the legislature and the idealist in the governor’s chair should have been enough to keep one from despairing altogether, though one honest old peasant cannot save a legislature any more than one swallow can make a summer. I do not mean to say that he was the only honest man in the legislature: there were many others, of course, but partizan politics prevented their honesty from being of much avail; or, at any rate, they did not control events. With the measurable advance in thought since that time, and the general progress of the species, we know now that men do not control events half so much as events control men; we do not know exactly what it is that does control men--that is, those of us who are not Socialists do not know. Altgeld, at any rate, was disgusted with politics, as well he might have been, since they wrecked his fortune and broke his heart. And it was with relief, I know, that he said that morning,--almost the last he passed in the governor’s chair,--as he and I were going up the long walk to the State House steps: “Well, we’re rid of this, anyway.” XVIII