It was summer, the full flushed summer of central Illinois and the corn stood tall on the Sangamon bottoms, flashing its heavy blades in the sun. Miles and miles it spread across Logan, and Polk, and on into Moultrie County, where the Kaskaskia flows widening down to join the Mississippi at a place where the Sucker state found the picturesque beginnings of its history. There were long, calm days of scorching heat, and other days, when the clouds closed over the plains, and the humid air was too heavy to breathe. But still the corn flourished, rustling in the warm winds that blow forever across the rolling prairies, and ripened fast against the time when it should be hauled to the distilleries along the placid Illinois or stored in long cribs to await the ever-expected rise in the grain market at Chicago. Viewed from some impossible altitude, the great, green corn fields were broken here and there by smaller fields of wheat, in which some venturesome farmer reaped a little crop hardly indigenous to that black soil, and to the eastward, over the broad pastures of virgin prairie, blocky cattle browsed and fattened at their leisure. The mud roads lay deep in powdered dust, the whole land droned in the full tide of warm summer life, and men everywhere were glad, like the insects that made the throbbing air vocal with their endless shrilling, like the cattle that huddled through the long afternoons in the shade of some wind-break of slender young trees, like the corn itself forever glinting in the sun. Of all the thousands of people, happy as the summer in their toil, there was none who would have ascribed his happiness to the government under which he lived. Few of them, indeed, at that busy season took any interest in their government. Later on in the fall, when the summer was over and the fields but bare ground, spiked with short-pointed stalks, when the corn and the cattle had been shipped to Chicago; in the days when the darkness and the rain would come, they would think of government, perhaps become excited about it. But now, all over the Thirteenth Congressional District, a few men in each county seat were gratuitously attending to government for them, plotting and scheming to place certain names on the ballot, confident in the knowledge that in November the people would divide themselves arbitrarily into parties, and go through the empty formality of ratifying the selections that would result from all their manoeuvers and machinations. Thus the business of the people's government is carried on.