For this state, it is plain, he has the late Sam Gompers to thank--that great idealist and easy mark. If he sent less than ten hay-wagons of roses to Sam’s funeral, then he is a niggard, indeed. For Sam got upon the back of the American labor movement when it was beginning to be dangerous, and rode it so magnificently that at the end of his life it was as tame as a tabby cat. It retains that character to-day, and will continue to do so as long as the Gompersian hierarchy lasts,--that is, so long as Judge Gary and his friends continue to appoint Sam’s heirs and assigns to high-sounding committees, and to invite them to gaudy dinners. A plate of puddle duck and a chance to make a speech--that was always enough to fetch Sam. And when Sam was fetched, the 4,000,000 members of the American Federation of Labor were also fetched. Where else in the world is there a great union organization that has so long and honorable a record as a strike-breaker? Or that is so diligently devoted to keeping the lower ranks of labor in due subordination? If it had been conceived and hatched by Judge Gary himself, it could not have been more nearly perfect. Practically considered, it is not a labor organization at all; it is simply a balloon mattress interposed between capital and labor to protect the former from the latter. Gazing upon it, I daresay, Judge Gary feels a glow flickering along the periphery of his gizzard, and if he were not a Christian he would permit himself a guffaw. I leave the sweetest to the last. The courts might be docile, Congress might be consecrated to right thought, labor might grovel and the bench of bishops might applaud, but if there were an anarchist in the White House it would all go for naught. Imagine, then, Judge Gary’s joy in contemplating the incomparable Cal! It is almost as if, in New York, a bootlegger were made king. The man’s merits, in the Babbitt view, are almost fabulous. He seems, indeed, scarcely like a man at all, but more like some miraculous visitation or act of God. He is the ideal made visible, if not audible--perfection put into a cutaway coat and trotted up and down like a mannequin in a cloak and suit atelier. Nor was there any long stress of training him--no season of doubt and misgiving. Nature heaved him forth full-blown, like a new star shot into the heavens. In him the philosophy of Babbitt comes to its perfect and transcendental form. Thrift, to him, is the queen of all the virtues. He respects money in each and every one of its beautiful forms--pennies, nickels, dimes, dollars, five-dollar bills, and so on _ad infinitum_. He venerates those who have it. He believes that they have wisdom. He craves the loan and use of that wisdom. He invites them to breakfast, and listens to them. The things they revere, he reveres. The things they long for, he longs to give them.