much attention to business and not enough to politics—and then ask how you're going to get more interest in politics by taking all the offices away from the people and putting them in cold-storage. Get my idea? "
The reporter nodded.
"Well, if you think it's any good, trim it up. Tell 'em it's all right to holler about a public office being a private snap, but ask how the registration is going to be kept up in the ward if mansions in the skies are to be the only reward for the fellows who drive the hacks. Of course, don't use those words, but you understand my point."
When the interview and the Sunday story were printed they appeared under the head "A Tribune of the People," and the story told how Thomas Wharton had risen from an humble farmer boy, step by step, office upon office, from school-teacher to county superintendent, from that to State legislator, upward into the National Congress, where he served six terms; and how, by trusting in the people, he had weathered every political storm and had finally anchored in the United States Senate. The reporter made a good story. The managing editor said so, and Wharton bought ten copies of the paper, an unusually large number of copies to buy for any story, if the papers are not ordered in advance. But the story had its limitations. There was much that it did not tell, and in the nature of things, could not tell. For instance, to lay bare Wharton's ambition would be interesting, of course, but perhaps libellous; for it was fearfully and wonderfully made, that ambition—and it was constantly changing. Yet Wharton had worshipped it for forty years, observing no variation in it. When he came home from the Civil War and taught country school, his ambition beckoned him to be a statesman, to serve his country, to thwart corruption in high places, and to stand for the rights of the poor and the oppressed. He made a good record in the State legislature, and when the best element in his party sent him to Congress, in his speech at the ratification meeting he shed tears of joyful gratitude that his opportunity had come to him. He chose to forget certain irregularities of the ballot in a doubtful county, for he had an earnest faith that the end justified the means. The insincerity, corruption, the pulling and hauling for place and power which he saw during his first term in Congress, shocked him. But in his second term he began to count that sort of thing as part of the game. During his third term he accepted deals and jobs and sly, legalized official steals as matters of fact and of course. Later he took Indian supply contracts himself. The women lobbyists, who provoked Wharton's disgust as a young congressman, ceased to interest him at all in his fifth term. The justification of his means by faith, being needed less and less frequently to salve his conscience, was no longer an act of volition with Wharton. He lived in hotels at Washington, while his family lived at home on the farm in the outskirts of Baxter. Wharton grew mellow and cynical in his cast of thought, yet there were times when he recalled his youthful visions and hoped against hope that the day would come when he might realize them. In the meantime he controlled his district machine, and his party's national organization oiled the machine well with fat fried from concerns east of the Alleghanies which were affected by Wharton's attitude upon important congressional committees.
For Wharton was a power in the House. He was known as an efficient man, which being translated means that he was a proficient log-roller and that he had reduced mutual back-scratching to a fine art. His strong hold as a congressman was in pensions. He framed a pension law which made his name hated in the East, but made it sacred at the camp-fires and bean-dinners in the West, where the soldiers took their free homesteads after Appomattox.
In his last congressional fight he spent $2,300 to buy some refractory delegations in the nominating convention, and the end was nebulous and hazy while the means were palpable to an important degree. So palpable, indeed, that, when Tom Wharton defeated Senator Gardner and the Wharton machine won, the element in his party that first sent Wharton to Congress opposed him most bitterly in the senatorial contest.
