Honest John Vane: Part Iv

VIII.

THE very faint promise of aid which seemed to exhale from Vane’s question cheered up Dorman a little.

There was a strange brightening in his dusky eyes, followed by a momentary obscuration and haziness, as though a few sparks had risen to their surface from some heated abyss, and had gone out there in a trifle of smoke. He started up and paced the room briskly for some seconds, meanwhile tightly clasping his dried-up, blackened claws across his coat-skirts, perhaps to keep his long tail from wagging too conspicuously inside his trousers, — that is, supposing he possessed such an unearthly embellishment.

“ I ’ll tell you what we want,” he at last chuckled, with the air of a man who is about to utter a devilish good joke. “ We want, first, a bill to stop the collection of interest until the loan falls due, when we will pay the one hundred and thirty millions at once, if we can. Second, we want a bill to change the government lien from a first to a second mortgage, so that we can issue a batch of first-mortgage bonds and raise money for current expenses. That’s all we want now, Vane, and I ’m sure it’s moderate.”

“ O, ain’t it, though?” grinned Honest John, half indignant and half amused at this impudent rapacity. “ I’m sure it’s very kind of you not to ask Uncle Sam to throw in the whole loan as a present. I dare say you might get it.”

“ O, we ’re not a bit greedy,” Dorman continued to chuckle. “Well, now, to go back to business, we must have good men to help us. We want the very best. The fellows who have pushed us through so far are mainly such notorious dead-beats in point of character that they would throw discredit on a recruiting agency. We want a fresh lot, and a respectable lot. We want such fellows as Christian and Faithful in the Senate, and you and Greatheart and Hopeful in the House.”

Honest John Vane pondered ; he thought of his good fame, and then he thought of his debts ; he thought of his insufficient salary, and of the abounding millions of the Great Subfluvial. Finally he came to the risky decision that he would just ask the way to the bottomless pit, reserving for further consideration the question of leaping into its seething corruption.

“ How are you going to get us ? ” he inquired, in a choked and almost inaudible voice, the voice of a man who is up to his lips in a quicksand.

The eyes of the Mephistopheles of the lobby glowed with a lurid excitement which bore an infernal resemblance to joy. He had a detestable hope that at last he was about to strike a bargain with his simple Faust. There was more than the greed of lucre in his murky countenance ; there was seemingly a longing to buy up honesty, character, and self-respect; there was eagerness to purchase a soul.

“ We can make things just as pleasant as a financier could want,” he answered, coming at once to the point of remuneration. “ You don’t want stock in the Subfluvial, of course. If you held shares in that and then gave it a lift, the opposition lobby would bawl about it, and the public might impute selfish motives. But we have got up an inside machine, which is all the same with the Subfluvial, and yet isn’t the same. It works under a separate charter, and yet has the same engineers. It builds the tunnel, handles the capital once or twice, and keeps what sticks to its fingers. It’s a construction committee, in short, which fixes its own compensation. It ’s a sure, quiet, rich thing for dividends. I don’t know a safer or more profitable investment. We can let you into that, and you can draw your hundred and fifty per cent a year, and all the while be as snug as a bug in a rug. Will you come inside the rug ? Will you stand by the great, sublime, beneficent, liberal Subfluvial ? Say you will, John ! It’s a noble national enterprise. Say you ’ll see it out.”

As Honest John Vane stared at his grimy tempter, striving to decide whether he would accept or spurn that tempter’s degrading proffer, he had the air of a man who is uncomfortably ill, and his appearance was matched by his sensations. There was woful sickness in his heart; and, to use a common phrase more easily understood than explained, it struck to his stomach; and that fleshly-minded organ, taking its own physical view of the matter, electrified every nerve with the depressing thrills of bodily indisposition. He was as ill at ease and as pale as the unseaworthy landsman whom Neptune has just begun to toss in his great blanket. Moreover, he felt that he was pale ; he knew that he did not present the healthy countenance of stalwart innocence ; and this knowledge increased his discomposure, and made him logk fairly abject.

It would be impossible, short of reiterating all the circumstances of our story, to give a complete idea of his thoughts and emotions. But we must specify that he sorrowfully blamed his wife for those follies of hers which had driven him into debt; that he cursed the widespread social extravagance which had made of that wife a pitiless, or at least an uncomprehending extortioner and spendthrift; and that he cursed even more bitterly that whole system of subsidies and special legislation which was now drawing around him its gilded nets of bribery. There were stinging reminiscences, too, of his worthy glorying in the title of Honest; of his loud and sincere promises to acclaiming fellow-citizens that he would labor tirelessly at the task of congressional reform ; of his noble trust that he might establish a broad and permanent fame on the basis of official uprightness. All these things went through him at once like a charge of small shot. No wonder that his moral nature bled exhaustively, and that he had the visage of a man stricken with mortal wounds.

It must be observed, however, that his grief and compunction were not of the highest character, such as would doubtless accompany the downfall of a truly noble nature. There is a rabble in morals as well as in manners, and to this spiritual mobocracy Vane belonged by birth. The fibre of his soul was coarse, and it had never been refined or purified by good breeding, and very likely it was not capable of taking a finish. No such “self-made man” was he as Abraham Lincoln, or many another who has shed honor on lowly beginnings, and made the phrase “selfmade ” dear to millions. On the contrary, he was one of those whose mission it is to show the millions that they are disposed to over-estimate the qualities implied by this absurdly popular epithet. He had his good fruits ; but they sprang from feeble or selfish motives, and so were not likely to bear abundantly. He did not prize virtue for its own sake, but because the name of it had brought him honor. In truth, his far-famed honesty had thus far stood on a basis of decent egotism and respectable vanity. When his selfconceit was sapped by debt and by the sense of legislative failure, the superstructure sagged, leaned, gaped in rifts, and was ready to sink under the first deluge of temptation.

In the expression with which he looked at Dorman, you could see how much his vanity was hurt. He had a stare of dislike and anger which would have caused a human being of ordinary sensibilities either to quit the room or roll up his sleeves for a fight. Like many another over-tempted person, he hated his tempter while submilling to him, and because he submitted to him. His soul, indeed, was in a confounding turmoil of contradictions, and did not work at all as the souls of accountable creatures are meant to work. Had he retained full presence of mind, he would have held back his concession to wrong until he could make a bargain, and sell his soul for at least what little it was worth. But his very first words of sin were at once an apology for it and a confession that he was not in circumstances to dictate his own price for it.

“ Darius, I am awfully hard up,” he said, with an abject pathos which ought to have drawn a bonus from the most griping and illiberal of the Lords of Hell. But an utterance of weakness or suffering was the last thing in the world which could draw generosity from the nondescript sinner who had come to entice him. It may be that Dorman was only a fiend in embryo, who was still awaiting diabolical regeneration, and had not even commenced his growth in the true infernal graces ; but if so, he was a chrysalis or tadpole of truly abominable promise, whose evolution would be likely to fill all Gehenna with gladness, and cause it to welcome his coming with strewings of its most sulphurous palm-branches. No doubt his anthropological experience had been an advantage to him ; he had absorbed all the evil that he could find in business, politics, and lobbying ; he had developed to the utmost the selfish, pitiless instincts of traffic and chicane. All the law and the prophets that he knew were comprised in the single Mammonite commandment, Thou shalt buy cheap and sell dear. The consequence was that he listened to John Vane’s avowal of bankruptcy without a throb of compassion. Indeed, his only emotion on hearing that cry of a stumbling soul was a huckstering joy in the hope of getting a good thing at a bargain. The cheaper the better, the more of a trading triumph, and therefore the nobler. Whoever has read the stories of those diabolical temptations which were so common in the “ ages of faith,” knows that Satan is anxious to purchase immortal spirits on the shabbiest possible terms. The reason is plain : a beggarly price not only “ bears ” the market, but throws contempt on the “line of merchandise” traded for; it exposes to the scorn of chaos the spiritual and, therefore, most perfect work of the Creator.

Dorman possessed in full measure this Luciferian humor of higgling. Discovering that Vane was in financial extremities, he inferred that he would “ sell out at a low figure.” He had come empowered to offer five thousand dollars for the respectability which lay in Honest John’s character; but he now decided that be would throw out only the bait with which he was accustomed to angle for the ordinary fry of Congressmen. If one thousand dollars’ worth of stock sufficed to land his fish, there would remain four thousand dollars for himself, a very fair commission.

“ You ought not to miss this chance, Vane,” he said, with the calmness of a horsedealer. “ We will guarantee you ten per cent, and it is pretty certain to pay fifty, and may pay twice as much.”

“ Of course it will pay anything that you inside fellows choose to make it pay,” answered the Congressman, with a bluntness which revealed his moral inflammation. He was in the condition of a man who is having a tooth pulled, and who cannot but desire to make a bite at his dentist’s fingers.

“ Well, that’s so, of course,” admitted Dorman, with the smile of a trickster who decides to make a merit of enforced frankness. “ But it would n’t do for us to cut the profits too fat, you know. We can’t divide up the whole Subfluvial stock and government loan among the construction ring. We ’ve got to draw a line somewhere. Say a hundred per cent, now.”

“ Say so, if you like,” returned John Vane, sullenly, mean while searching in vain for some pecuniary escape from this bargain, so full of risk for his good name and of humiliation to his vanity.

“ Well, I say so ; that’s agreed on,” winked Dorman.

There was a silence now which endured through several eternal seconds. The statesman who was for sale and the lobbyist who wanted to buy him were both alike unwilling to name a price, the former through shame and the latter through niggardliness,

“ There is n’t much of this left,” Dorman at last resumed. “ Stands at one or two hundred per cent above par. It’s such a safe and paying thing that there’s been a loud call for it.”

Vane made no response ; he had an appearance even of not listening to the agent of the abysses of corruption. The truth is that he was beginning to recover his self-possession, and with it his faculty for dickering.

“ I could let you have five hundred of it, though,” continued the lobbyist, still bent upon getting his soul for a song.

“Do you mean to insult me?” demanded Vane, with a glare which might mean either huckstering anger at the meanness of the bribe or virtuous indignation at being offered a bribe at all.

“ Say a thousand, then,” added Dorman, with a spasmodic start, as if the offer had been jerked out of him by red-hot pincers, or as if the breath in which he uttered it had been a scalding steam of brimstone. “Senators Christian and Faithful took a thousand each, and were glad to get it. Let me see ; we’ve had to go as high as that on some of the House fellows, too, — such men as Greatheart and Hopeful, for instance. Well, I ought not to mention names.”

“ Why, those are our biggest figureheads ! ” Vane almost shouted, springing up and pacing the room in amazement.

“Of course they are,” grinned Dorman. “ The very highest sign-boards in Congress, the saints and the advocates of reform, and the watch-dogs of the Treasury! There are no men of better reputation inside politics.”

“I wouldn’t have thought it — of them,” pursued Vane. “ I knew there was a raft of fellows who took investments in things that they voted for. But I supposed there were some exceptions.”

The lobbyist knew that there were exceptions ; he had learned by dint of rebuffs that Congressmen existed who were either pure enough or rich enough to be above pecuniary temptation ; but he was careful not to mention this fact to his proposed victim.

“ Well, you see how it is, at last,” he resumed. “ You see that the candle of fame only lights up a game for money. And now what’s the use of your holding different notions from everybody else? You haven’t been practical, John Vane; you’ve been eccentric and highfalutin. I put it to you, as one fair-minded business man to another, is it generous or just for a capitalist to ask a member to work for him gratis ? I say not. If I see an honest chance to make five thousand dollars, and you give me a lift which enables me to use that chance, I ought to allow you a share in the investment. And that’s what I do. I’ve got five thousand of this inside stock — ”

Here he had another spasmodic start, which ended in a prolonged fit of coughing, as though the brimstone fumes which we have imputed to his breath were unusually dense and stifling. Of course it could not have been remorse or shame which interfered with his breathing, although the five thousand dollars which he talked of had been given him to transfer to Vane, and although his own private share of the “Hen Persuader” stock already amounted to fifty thousand. Of remorse or shame he must have been fundamentally incapable. If he felt any human passion at this moment, it must have been a peanut pedler’s gladness.

“ And I offer you twenty per cent of it,” he continued, when he had recovered his utterance. “ That’s about fair, I think, for I’ve only this one investment on hand, and can’t possibly attend to more, while you can dip into all the national enterprises that are going. And don’t you make Puritanic faces over it. It is n’t money, you see. So help me Lucifer ! I would n't think of offering money to you. It’s just a business chance. Is there anything low in a Congressman’s putting his money where his constituents put theirs ? Is n’t he thereby joining his fortunes with theirs? That’s what I said to Greatheart, and he could n’t get round it, and he took the stock.”

“ I ’ll — I ’ll take it, too,” was John Vane’s response, — a mere choked gasp of a response, but heard, perhaps, all through Pandemonium.

“ All right! ” laughed Dorman, leaping up and giving his member’s back a slap, which ought to have left the imprint of a fiery hand. “ Well, I ’ll hold the stock for you,” he promptly added, with a sly sparkle in his smoky eyes. “Just to keep your name off the books and out of the newspapers, you understand.”

Our Congressman pondered for a full minute before he replied. He was no longer Honest John Vane, but he desired to remain such in the eyes of the public, and consequently he did not want the stock in his own name. At the same time he shrewdly doubted whether it would be worth much to him, if it stood to the credit of Dorman. His countenance was at this moment a study for a painter of character. There were two phases in it, the one growing and the other waning, like the new moon encroaching upon the old. In a moment you might say that it had undergone a transfiguration, though not such a one as apostles would desire to honor with tabernacles. All the guile in his soul — that slow, loutish guile which lies at the bottom of so many low-bred and seemingly simple natures— rose to the surface of his usually genial and hearty expression, like oily scum to the surface of water. His visage actually took a physical lubricity from it, and shone like the fraudful superficies of a shaved and greased pig.

“ I won’t trouble you to hold my property for me, Darius,” he said. “ I ’ll hold it in my own name. Honesty is the best policy.”

This last phrase was a noteworthy one. It showed that he had already entered upon the life of a hypocrite. A little before be had been a living body of honesty ; now he was a vampire, but he still retained his decent carcass.

“ Now, — look here, John, — would you ?” hesitated the lobbyist, who had hoped to make the shares stick to his own fingers. “ Christian and Greatheart and those fellows have n’t. You see, if there should be an exposure, and this stock should be found in your name, you would n’t be on the investigating committee.”

“ Never mind, I ’ll do the square thing,” replied Vane, to whom it had suddenly occurred that the Great Subfluvial and its “ Hen Persuader ” worked under separate charters, so that a man who held property in one might plausibly claim a right to vote on the other.

“O, well, if you insist upon it,” assented Dorman, much chagrined. “ If you choose to risk it, why, of course — Well, now about paying for the stock : as you are hard up, suppose we let the dividends go toward that.”

“ Suppose we don’t,” promptly returned Vane, remembering how direly he needed ready cash. “Suppose you hand me the certificates at once, and the dividends as fast as they fall in.”

The lobbyist looked at his victim with an air of spite qualified by admiration. Maelzel might have had a similar expression (though not by any possibility so vicious and diabolical) when he was beaten at chess by his own automaton.

“ I have caught a Tartar,” he grinned. “ When you turn your attention to finance, John, you show your business training. Your game is n't the safest, though. All the sly old hands, — all the fellows who have graduated in the lobbies of the State Legislatures, and bribed their way from there into Congress,— all those shysters have had the shares sold for them and taken nothing but the plain greenbacks. I see whatyour false bosom is made of, John, — the fair front of honest simplicity and ignorance. It may do you, and it may not. The faster a hog swims the more he cuts his throat with his own hoofs,” he added, with a spite which made him coarse. “ You’d better let me keep the stock for you.”

John Vane lighted a cigar and smoked with an air of indifference.

“ Well,” sighed the imp, who had not bought a soul as cheaply as he had hoped, “ have it your own way, then. I ’ll bring the certificate to-morrow.”

IX.

AND now Honest John Vane had become Dishonest John Vane, and justified Dorman’s contemptuous nickname of Weathercock John.

He had accepted stock in a financial enterprise, which might fairly be called a Juggernaut of swindling, on the understanding that he would grease its rusted wheels with fresh legislation, and help roll it once more through the public treasury and over the purses of the people. In so doing, he had trampled on such simian instincts of good as had been born in him, on such development of conscience as he had been favored with during his sojourn in this christianly human cycle, on resolutions which he knew to be noble, because everybody had told him so, and on promises whereby he had secured power. He had proved that, so far as he could be a moral anything, he was a moral failure. In all the miscellaneous “ depravity of inanimate things” he most resembled a weak-jointed pair of tongs, such as pusillanimously cross their legs, let their burdens drop back into the coals, and pinch the hand which trusts them.

In short, he had easily fallen into the loose horde of Congressional foragers or “ bummers,” who never do one stroke of fighting in the battle of real statesmanship, but prowl after plunder in the trail of the guerillas of the lobby. Their usual history, as the well-informed Darius Dorman has already hinted to us, was this : they had acquired a mastery of log-rolling and bribery and stealing in the halls or the lobbies of the State Legislatures ; and, having there gained sufficient wealth or influence, had bribed their way to Congress, with the sole object of plundering more abundantly. John Vane, on the contrary, had been elected by a hopeful people, going about with a lantern to look for an honest politician. He had meant to be honest; he had, so to speak, taken upon himself the vows of honesty ; and now, for a thousand or two of dollars, he had broken them. He differed from a majority of his brethren in piratical legislation just as a backslider and hypocrite differs from a consistent sinner.

Can we palliate his guilt? We repeat here,— for the moral importance of the fact will justify iteration,— that he came of a low genus. It was a saying of the oldest inhabitant of Slowburgh, that “ up to John’s time there never had been a magnificent Vane.” No more was there one now. Although some blessed mixture had clarified the family soul in him a little, he still retained much sediment deposited by the muddy instincts of his ancestors, and a very little shaking stirred it all through his conduct. Proper breeding and education might have made him a permanently worthy soul; but of those purifying elements he had been favored with only a few drops. He had risen somewhat above his starting-point, but he still remained below the highest tide-water mark of vice, and got no foothold on the dry land of the loftier moral motives. Sidlingcrab-like about in these low grounds, the daily flood rolled in and submerged him.

It is impossible to insist too strongly upon the fact that he had no sound self-respect and lofty sense of honor. Of that noble pride which renders unassailable the integrity of a Washington, a Calhoun, an Adams, or a Sumner, he had not laid the lowest foundation, and perhaps could not. In place of this fortress, he possessed only the little, combustible block-house of vanity. All, or nearly all, his uprightness had sprung from a desire to win the hurrahs of men who were no better than himself, or who were his inferiors. The title of Honest John (knocked down to him at such a shamefully low price as must have given him but a slight idea of its value) had merely tickled his conceit, as red housings tickle that of a horse. It was a fine ornament, which distinguished him from the mass of John Vanes, some of whom were in jail. It was a nom deguerre, by aid of which he could rally voters around him, and perhaps win further glories at the polls. Mainly for these trivial and merely external reasons had he striven to hold on to it, and not because he believed that reputation, self-respect, and sense of honor were precious, far more precious than happiness or even life.

Such a motive force is of course no force at all, but a mere weather-cock, which obeys the wind of public opinion, instead of directing it. Vane had now been exposed for some time to a moral breath which differed greatly from that of his hard-working, precise, exact, and generally upright constituents. In the first place he had found, as he thought, that in Washington his title of Honest brought him no influence and little respect. He suspected that it was chiefly his unwillingness to have a finger in the fat pies of special legislation which had caused him to be kept on the minor committees. He saw other members, who were as new, as untrained, and as comically ignorant as himself,— but who had the fame among the lobbyists of being “good workers,” and able to “ put things through,” — he saw them called to positions of distinguished responsibility, far higher on the roll of honor than himself. He learned, or supposed he had learned, that many Congressmen kept Uncle Sam’s eagle setting on their own financial eggs. He knew members who had come to Washington poor, and who now owned square miles on the lines of great railroads, and rode in their carriages, while he and his wife walked. For a time the prosperity of these knaves had not punctured his soap-bubble honesty, because he still believed that there was a Congressional public which condemned them, and respected him. Classing himself with Senators Christian and Faithful, and with those almost equally venerated images, Representatives Greatheart and Hopeful, he continued for a time to stand proudly in his honored niche, and to despise the rabble of money-changers below.

But at last Dorman had told him, and his necessities easily led him to believe, that he was alone in his virtuous poverty ; Christian, Greatheart, and the other reputed temples of righteousness were nothing but whited sepulchres, full of railroad bonds and all uncleanness. This illumination from the secrets of the pit bewildered him, and caused him to topple from the narrow footing of his probity. He resolved that he would not be the only case of honest indigence and suffering in the whole political world. Besides, what risk did he run of losing his home popularity by accepting a few golden eggs from the manipulators of the Hen Persuader? The fact might become current news in Hell, but it would never reach Slowburgh. Was it likely that Congress would expose the interior of a thieving machine on which so many of its members had left their finger-marks? Even if an investigation should be forced, there was such a trick as doing it with closed doors, and there was such a material as committee-room whitewash.

There was still a momentous question before Vane, — the question whethhe would continue to walk with the Mammonite crew, or make use of his deliverance from debt to resume his former respectable courses. The manner in which he decided it furnishes another proof of the jelly-fish flabbiness which characterized his rudimentary nature. Many a cultivated spirit tumbles once down the declivity of guilt, and then climbs back remorsefully to the difficult steeps of well-doing. But our self-manufactured and self-instructed hero, there he continued to stick in the mud where he had drifted, like any other mollusk, and absorbed and fattened and filled his shell, a model of stolid and immoral content.

Just in one direction — the only direction in which he had been thoroughly educated — he showed energy. At business he had worked hard and made himself what is called a good business man, sharp-sighted in detecting his own interest, and vigorous in delving for it. If in the present case he had not made a particularly fine bargain for himself, it had been because he was new to that thieves’ brokerage, the lobby, and bewildered at finding himself hustled into it. But, although he had sold his virtue at a low figure, he was now determined to get the full price agreed upon. As Dorman did not bring him the promised certificate of stock, he sought him out and secured it. Next he heard that a dividend had fallen due on the day of his purchase ; hence another call on his fellow-sinner, and a resolute demand for the sum total of said dividend.

“But the transfer is dated the day after the dividend,” objected Dorman, who, like the rest of his subterranean kind, did not want to pay a cent more for a soul than he could help.

“Yes, I know it is,” answered Dishonest John Vane, angrily. “And that’s a pretty trick to play on a man whose help you ask for. Now I want you to make that transfer over again, and date it the day on which I took the stock, and pay me the dividend due on it.”

Dorman, wizened with disappointed greed and slyness, looked less like a triumphant goblin than usual, and more like a scorched monkey. His wilted visage twitched, his small, quick, vicious eyes glanced here and there anxiously, and he had an air of being ready to drop on all fours and scramble under a table. Nevertheless, as there was no resisting a lawgiver of the United States, he corrected the certificate and paid the dividend.

“ I don’t see how I came to make this blunder,” he chattered, arching his eyebrows as apologetical monkeys do.

“You don’t pronounce it right; it was n’t blunder, but plunder,” smiled Vane, with a satirical severity suggestive of Satan rebuking Sin.

In an amazingly short time after these solvent providences had befallen Weathercock John, all the lobbyites out of Gehenna seemed to have learned that he was “approachable.” These turkey buzzards have a marvellous aptitude at scenting a moral carcass, and Vane, who did not so much as suspect that he was dead, must have been already in need of burial, and pungently attractive to their abominable olfactories. They gathered around him and settled upon him, until he might be described as fairly black with them. Gentlemen who, to be in character, ought to have had raw necks and a sore-toed gait, croaked into his ears every imaginable scheme for pilfering, not only the fatness and the life-blood, but the very bones out of Uncle Sam. It is arithmetically certain that, had every one of these pick-purse plans been carried out successfully, the Secretary of the Treasury would have had to suspend all manner of payments.

Among so many golden bows of promise, Weathercock John was able to make a judicious pick, and to find lots of full purses at the ends of them. He would have nothing to do with “ national highways,” because he was already higbwaying it on the line of the Great Subfluvial, and did not want to become known as one of the “ railroad ring.” He selected the congenial case of a deceased horse, who had been killed by our troops in Western New York during the War of 1812, and who had already drawn his ghostly claim for damages through five Congresses, the amount thereof quadrupling with every successive journey, so that it had risen from $ 125 to $32,000. Also he pitched upon the case of certain plantation buildings in Florida, which had been destroyed by the same indiscreet soldiery while striving to defend them from the Seminoles, or by the Seminoles while struggling to take them from the soldiery ; and which, by dint of repeated “settlements and adjustments on principles of justice and equity,” every settlement being made the pretext of a new adjustment, and every adjustment the pretext of a new settlement, had grown in worth from about $ 8,000 to about $ 134,000, — one of the most remarkable instances of the rise of property ever witnessed in a thinly settled country. Likewise he hit upon the grievance of a mail contractor, who, having failed to carry his mails and so forfeited his contract, now demanded (through his heirs) $ 10,000 in damages ; also $ 15,000 for mail services, in addition to those not rendered ; also $20,000 of increased compensation for the mail services not rendered, together with interest and costs to the amount of $15,000 more.

These, and some dozen other similar swindles, our member took under his legislative protection, proposing to put them through as such little jokers usually are put through ; that is, by tacking them on to appropriation bills at the very end of the session. As for remuneration, he was fair minded enough to be content with ten per cent on each successful claim, whereas some unscrupulous statesmen extorted as much as fifteen or twenty. It is needless to say that, in view of this conscientious moderation, the lobby itself was stricken with a sense of unholy gratitude, and began to shout through its organs, “ Hurrah for Honest John Vane ! ” You may imagine how it delighted and strengthened him to find that, no matter what villanous trick he played upon the public, he could not lose his glorious nickname. So cheered was he by this incongruous good fortune that he ventured to introduce a little bill of his own into Congress, appropriating $ 50,000 for a new cemetery for “the heroic dead of the late war,” the contract for the coffins to be awarded to one Elnathan Sly, who was his own man of straw or alter ego.

Meantime he would have nothing to do with those visionary projects which “had no money in them.” His motto was, “No Irish need apply,” meaning thereby indigent applicants for legislation, or applicants who would not offer to go snacks. When an author urged him to introduce an international copyright bill, he cut short his visitor’s prosing about the interests ot literature by saying brusquely, “ Sir, I may as well tell you at once that I don’t care anything about this subject, and I don’t believe anybody can make me care about it.” When some simple college professors wanted him to propose an appropriation for the observation of an eclipse, he got rid of the venerable Dryasdusts by a stroke of rare humor, telling them that his specialty was Revolutionary pensions. When a wooden-legged captain of volunteers applied to him for the Slowburgh Post Office, he treated him with promises, which sent him home promptly in high spirits, and then secured the position for one of his own wire-pullers, a man who had enlisted for the war in the Home Guards.

A great change, you will say ; an unnaturally sudden eclipse ; an improbably complete decadence. Not so ; in his inmost being Vane bad not altered; only in the incrustations of life deposited by surroundings. Barring the molluscous characteristic of easy good nature, and that sort of companionable generosity which amounts to give and take, he had never been beneficent and unselfish. He had not moral sympathy enough to feel the beauty of virtue in the individual, nor intellect enough to discover the necessity of virtue to the prosperity of society, nor culture enough to value any educational instrument finer than a common-school. Considering the bare poverty of his spiritual part, indeed, our Congressman was merely a beggar on horseback; and it was no wonder that, once temptation got him faced hellwards, he rode to the devil with astonishing rapidity.

Well, John Vane fell from his respectable indigence into degradingly thrifty circumstances. He paid all the debts which he had incurred during his abnormal, or at least accidental, course of honesty, and knew no more what it was to be without a comforting roll of pilfered greenbacks in his pocket. He hired a fine carriage for his wife, and gave her all the funds that she needed for entertainments and shopping, thereby arousing in her fresh respect and affection. Indeed, he so far satisfied the pecuniary expectations of Olympia that she no longer found the wealthy Ironman necessary to her happiness, and fell into a prudent way of discouraging his attentions. Once more our member’s home was tranquil, and he happy and glorious in the midst of it. A man who can dazzle and fascinate his own wedded Danäe with showers of gold is nothing less than a Jove of a husband.

It is worth noting that Olympia had no scruples about using these unaccustomed riches, and never once asked where they came from. Had she learned that they were filched from the public treasury, would she have accepted and spent them the less freely ? A venerable Congressman, thoroughly versed in all the male and female wickedness of Washington, assures me that women are conscienceless plunderers of public property, and will steal any official article which they can lay hands on, from a paper-folder upward.

At last came the end of the session. As is always the case, it was a season of wild turmoil and uproar, by no means resembling one’s idea of legislation, but more like a dam breaking away. The House was as frantic with excitement and as noisy with dissonant speaking as was the tower of Babel after the confusion of tongues. Honorable members who had special bills to push were particularly active and sonorous. They spouted ; they tacked on amendments ; they electioneered among their brother lawgivers; they were incredibly greedy and shameless. An imaginative observer might have fancied himself in a huge mock-auction shop, with two or three score of impudent Peter Funks hammering away at once, while dead horses were knocked down at a hundred times the price of live ones, and burnt barns, empty cotton bags, rotten steamers, and unbuilt railroads went at similar swindling prices, the victimized purchaser in every case being a rich simpleton called Uncle Sam. The time, talents, and parliamentary skill of the honest members were nearly all used up in detecting and heading off the immortal steeds which were turned into the national pastures by the dishonest ones. Many measures of justice, of governmental reform, and even of departmental necessity were, perforce, overlooked and left untouched. It seemed as though the only thing which Congress was not under obligation to attend to was the making of laws for the benefit of the whole people.

In this raid of special legislation upon real legislation John Vane was one of the most active and adroit guerillas. His “genial” smile simpered from desk to desk, like Hector’s shield blazing along the ranks of Trojan war. He had never smiled so before ; he very nearly smiled himself sick; he proved himself the smiler of smilers. There was no resisting such an obviously warm-hearted fellow, especially as he was generous, too, offering to Vote as he would be voted for. And everything prospered with him ; the taxes gathered from his countrymen melted on his schemes like butter on hot pancakes ; and when he left the House at midnight he was a man in “ respectable circumstances.”

He now had funds enough to carry the next nominating caucus in his district, and thus, with Dorman’s potent aid, to make fairly sure of a return to Congress. As he had once swept the ballot-boxes as Honest John Vane, so he purposed to sweep them again as Dishonest John Vane. But is the golden calf of lobbydom to be the directing deity of our politics forever! Is no axe to be laid to the root of this green bay tree of Slowburgh ? We shall see.

J. W. DeForest.