The party broke up in the small hours of the morning, and the only one who was then sober was the landlord. In fact it was well understood, even among his cronies, that he was too mean to drink to any excess except he drank on the treats of his numerous customers; and then he was careful not to be so much under its influence as to neglect his business. He was one of those men of whom, alas! the world has too many, who live to satisfy their own selfish interest no matter who may be made to suffer. CHAPTER XXIV. ALDERMAN TOPER'S FLATTERING OPINION OF THE "DODGER." The next week the "Licensed Liquor Sellers' Association" of the county held the meeting of which Rivers had spoken, and there were also representatives present from Toronto and other places. They all agreed that the plan outlined by Rivers would be the best to adopt; that was, if the reader recollects, to play a waiting game, and at the same time to treat the law with supreme contempt. "I tell you what it is," said Alderman Toper, who was one of the representatives from the city--having been elected an alderman by the whiskey interest, for He was proprietor of the "Toper House," one of the largest second-class hotels in the city--"I will spend a thousand dollars of my own money in order in the end to beat them." "Don't you think, Toper," said Rivers, "it would pay us to employ Gustavus Adolphus Dodger. I hear he is one of the best stump-speakers in the country, and that he can do as he likes with an average crowd What do you think? You know him better than I do." "Yes," said Toper, in an undertone, "I know his face better than I do his dimes, for I have had the former at my bar every day for the last six months, though nary one of the latter have I seen. But 'he is just the man for Galway,' for all that. He is the aptest, smoothest, most oily rascal I have ever met, and there is not a man in Canada that can hold a candle to him as a speaker in his own line. Why, I remember at a certain meeting he addressed a crowd who had been shouting themselves hoarse against the man in whose behalf he was about to speak, but he pleaded so eloquently and plausibly for his friend--and he was the man's friend, because he had received a consideration--that, before he was through, they shouted as loudly for the one whose cause he was advocating as they had a few moments before for his opponent." "I suppose," said William Soker, one of the delegates from the county, "there is no fear of the other side getting the start of us and buying him up, for, from what you say, I should judge he was in the market and ready to sell himself to the highest bidder." "There is no danger of that," said Toper, "for he has committed himself, soul and body, to the liquor interest, both upon the stump and through the press; and, though a man may not be troubled with that inconvenient article called principle, yet he has, to secure success, to be somewhat consistent."