And in this drama Senator Kern was soon to play the most important rôle, from the viewpoint of those who believed the extermination of Lorimerism to be essential to the safety of free institutions. There was nothing theatrical about the setting of the play. With the exception of a few weeks in Chicago the committee held its hearings in a prosy, unadorned, and small room on the ground floor of the senate office building. The witness chair in the center in the front of the room--to one side the long table of the press correspondents, at which sat some of the cleverest men of the profession--on the opposite side the members of the committee, and stretching back to the wall chairs for the audience. These were often, for the most part, unoccupied, but usually they were filled and many were standing--attaches of the capitol who dropped in while on their errands to catch a few words of the witnesses. These attaches were for the most part intense partisans of the accused senator, who found ways of making their feeling felt. And strangely enough the greater part of the audience through those hot summer days of 1911 and the winter days of 1912 were intensely loyal to the blond boss--so much so that the capitol policeman stationed in the room was requested by a Lorimer partisan to move the parties who were not sufficiently demonstrative in their jubilation when the accused man scored. In the front row sat Lorimer--bland, humble, the picture of innocent martyrdom--a pose he consistently maintained until he walked out of the senate at the behest of his colleagues and to the applause of the republic. Nothing so damaging as to disturb his composure, nothing so startling as to coax to his placid features an expression of surprise. And beside him sat the Symbol of his ruin--Edward Hines, the millionaire lumber man whose boast of having “put Lorimer over” whispered in the lobby of the Union League Club at Chicago resounded through the country. This strangely indiscreet, purse-proud exponent of Big Business at its worst hovered near Lorimer like a shadow. And there too beside him sat the clever, brilliant, sarcastic and witty Judge Henecy, his attorney--as resourceful and able as any lawyer in the country. Across the room at another table were the counsel of the committee, Healy and Marble, keen, alert, as resourceful as the judge and buttressed about by a better cause.