|THE curse of the Wandering Jew is upon the advertiser: he must move perpetually. Not that Sam would have been in any case content to sit idly on a seat in the Council Chamber. He hadn’t the sedentary gifts, nor was he of the breed of Ada, who, the state of matrimony once achieved, existed in contemplation of a glory which was even more vegetable than animal. He had to do something to justify a paper reputation for popularity and he had even to convince himself that he would not soon wake up to find it all a dream. It had happened too easily to be true, or, at least, safe. Wattercouch had hinted that things were expected of him. They were, of course, expected of him as a Liberal, and Sam was not, in fact, a Liberal but a Conservative. A Conservative is a man who conserves, who says “Aye” to the words of Giovanni Malatesta. “What I have snared, in that I set my teeth And lose with agony.” Sam had snared, he proposed to go on snaring and never to lose what he had snared. Whereas a Liberal is a Conservative weakened by sentimental compassion for the dispossessed. He is not the opposite of a Conservative, but a Conservative who is weak-minded, or timid or scrupulous enough to think himself a robber and to propose to give the poor some five per cent of his plunder. The opposite of a Conservative is an anarchist. Politically he was a Liberal because he thought the Liberals certain to come in for a long innings at the next election, and if there was any feeling about it at all (beyond a desire to be on the winning side), it was for the pudgy orator whose tremendous sentences had caught his imagination when he visited the House of Commons. What he did became known as the Verity affair. It might with equal and perhaps superior justice have been called the Branstone affair but for that malicious impulse which causes people to refer to a scandal by the name of the exposed rather than the exposer. It is like the odium which we attach to a man who has been in prison, where he had already had his punishment. Mankind is resolute against letting sleeping dogs lie. Mr. Alderman Verity was an elder statesman of the Council and a Conservative of the honest, unyielding type who thought that to approve of Tory Democracy was to be either a rogue or a fool, and Sam objected to him not because he was a Conservative, but for deeper reasons. Verity was the landlord of Sam’s offices. Every tenant objects to every landlord.