sturdy souls who can be depended on to come forward in emergencies and cry out aloud against a threatened political crime. Above the brute hubbub of a city's roar their voices are heard like the voice of conscience, and the hurrying throng pauses a second in its mad rush after dollars to listen to their tale of the Commonwealth's wrong. But what's in the air is not on earth. The practical politicians, whose affair it is to heed and counteract these honorable protests, laugh contemptuously at the vanity of any contest between theories and the "stuff." They know the overpowering logic of gold.
There were public meetings in Boston; good-government clubs throughout the State met and "resoluted"; citizens' organizations howled robbery and malfeasance. For a few weeks all Massachusetts seemed wrought up. From the space the papers gave the protestants one might have imagined that there was a chance for virtue, but the results of the clamor were more apparent than real. Day by day, night by night, the "machine" ground away at Young's, and as its product fell into the hopper Whitney and Towle only smiled at the clamor and awaited the moment when, as Towle coarsely put it, "the reformers would have yawped themselves to a standstill."
That day came at last. One by one, all in a perfectly orderly and methodical manner, the giving-bonds-to-compel-promises clauses, restrictive amendments and other people's safeguards had been voted down and the "Are you ready for the main question?" having been put in both houses, the Massachusetts Pipe Line Charter was duly passed and sent on to the governor. It required his signature to make the bill a hard-and-fast law, and that once appended, all Towle's "promises to pay" became due.
As the campaign neared a finish Whitney had, a number of times, informed his chiefs, and they the members of the Legislature, that the governor had given personal assurance that if the bill passed both houses,