In his white, still, rippleless way, Senator Hanway hated in his soul's
soul the name of Governor Obstinate. Night and day he carried that dull,
fortunate gentleman on his swell of thought and never ceased to consider
how he might deal him a blow or withstand him in any Presidential
stepping forward. And yet at no time had Senator Hanway--and himself the
master of every art of cord and creese in politics--felt more helpless.
If Governor Obstinate had been no more than just a finished politician,
a mere Crillon of political fence, Senator Hanway might have flashed his
ready point between his ribs. But the other's very crudities defended
him. He was primitive to the verge of despair. Even his strength was
primitive, inasmuch as it dwelt among the people rather than with the
machinists of party. Senator Hanway's monkish brow went often puckered
of a most uncanonical frown as he thought upon that sardonic Destiny
which had thrust this Governor Obstinate forward to become a stumbling
block in his way. In his angry contempt he could compare him to nothing
save a grizzly bear.
Whatever the justice of this last shaggy simile, even Senator Hanway
could not deny its formidable side. A grizzly, whether in fact or in
hyperbole, is no one good to meet. There is a supremacy of the
primitive; when the natural and the artificial have collided the latter
has more than once come limping off. Our soldiers cannot make the
Indians fight their fashion; the Indians make the soldiers fight _their_
fashion. If the soldiers were dense enough to insist upon their
formation, the Indians--fighting all over the field and each red warrior
for himself--would fill them as full of holes as a colander. When,
therefore, Senator Hanway called Governor Obstinate a grizzly, it was a
name of respect. The usual methods would not prevail in his stubborn
case. Most of all, money could not be employed to overthrow him; for his
foundations, like the foundations of any other grizzly, were original
and beyond the touch of money.
Now all this served to palsy the strength of Senator Hanway. In one
shape or another, and whether by promise or actual present production,
money was his one great tool; and where the tool has lost its power the
artisan is also powerless. It is not to Senator Hanway's discredit that
he would fail where money failed; Richelieu, wanting money, would have
been a turtle on its back. Wherefore, let it be rewritten that Senator
Hanway in the face of those clumsy, uncouth, half-seeing yet tremendous
potentialities of his enemy was seized of a helplessness never before
felt. To oppose the other with only those narrow means of money was like
trying to put down a Sioux uprising with a resolution of the Board of
Trade. Still, he must do his best; he must hold this Governor Obstinate
as much as he might in check, trusting to the chapter of accidents,
which in politics is a very lair of surprises, to suggest final ways and
means to baffle his advance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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