A Public-service-commission law might, ipso facto, have been quietly passed at this session, if the arbitrary franchise-extending proviso had not been introduced, and this on the thin excuse that so novel a change in the working scheme of the state government might bring about hardship to some. This redounded too obviously to the benefit of one particular corporation. The newspaper men--as thick as flies about the halls of the state capitol at Springfield, and essentially watchful and loyal to their papers--were quick to sense the true state of affairs. Never were there such hawks as newspapermen. These wretches (employed by sniveling, mud-snouting newspapers of the opposition) were not only in the councils of politicians, in the pay of rival corporations, in the confidence of the governor, in the secrets of the senators and local representatives, but were here and there in one another's confidence.
A piece of news--a rumor, a dream, a fancy--whispered by Senator Smith to Senator Jones, or by Representative Smith to Representative Jones, and confided by him in turn to Charlie White, of the Globe, or Eddie Burns, of the Democrat, would in turn be communicated to Robert Hazlitt, of the Press, or Harry Emonds, of the Transcript.
All at once a disturbing announcement in one or other of the papers, no one knowing whence it came. Neither Senator Smith nor Senator Jones had told any one. No word of the confidence imposed in Charlie White or Eddie Burns had ever been breathed. But there you were--the thing was in the papers, the storm of inquiry, opinion, opposition was on. No one knew, no one was to blame, but it was on, and the battle had henceforth to be fought in the open.
Consider also the governor who presided at this time in the executive chamber at Springfield. He was a strange, tall, dark, osseous man who, owing to the brooding, melancholy character of his own disposition, had a checkered and a somewhat sad career behind him.
Born in Sweden, he bad been brought to America as a child, and allowed or compelled to fight his own way upward under all the grinding aspects of poverty. Owing to an energetic and indomitable temperament, he had through years of law practice and public labors of various kinds built up for himself a following among Chicago Swedes which amounted to adoration. He had been city tax-collector, city surveyor, district attorney, and for six or eight years a state circuit judge. In all these capacities he had manifested a tendency to do the right as he saw it and play fair--qualities which endeared him to the idealistic. Honest, and with a hopeless brooding sympathy for the miseries of the poor, he had as circuit judge, and also as district attorney, rendered various decisions which had made him very unpopular with the rich and powerful --decisions in damage cases, fraud cases, railroad claim cases, where the city or the state was seeking to oust various powerful railway corporations from possession of property--yards, water-frontages, and the like, to which they had no just claim.
At the same time the populace, reading the news items of his doings and hearing him speak on various and sundry occasions, conceived a great fancy for him. He was primarily soft-hearted, sweet-minded, fiery, a brilliant orator, a dynamic presence. In addition he was woman-hungry--a phase which homely, sex-starved intellectuals the world over will understand, to the shame of a lying age, that because of quixotic dogma belies its greatest desire, its greatest sorrow, its greatest joy. All these factors turned an ultra-conservative element in the community against him, and he was considered dangerous. At the same time he had by careful economy and investment built up a fair sized fortune. Recently, however, owing to the craze for sky-scrapers, he had placed much of his holdings in a somewhat poorly constructed and therefore unprofitable office building. Because of this error financial wreck was threatening him. Even now he was knocking at the doors of large bonding companies for assistance.
This man, in company with the antagonistic financial element and the newspapers, constituted, as regards Cowperwood's public-service-commission scheme, a triumvirate of difficulties not easy to overcome. The newspapers, in due time, catching wind of the true purport of the plan, ran screaming to their readers with the horrible intelligence. In the offices of Schryhart, Arneel, Hand, and Merrill, as well as in other centers of finance, there was considerable puzzling over the situation, and then a shrewd, intelligent deduction was made.
"Do you see what he's up to, Hosmer?" inquired Schryhart of Hand.
"He sees that we have him scotched here in Chicago. As things stand now he can't go into the city council and ask for a franchise for more than twenty years under the state law, and he can't do that for three or four years yet, anyhow. His franchises don't expire soon enough. He knows that by the time they do expire we will have public sentiment aroused to such a point that no council, however crooked it may be, will dare to give him what he asks unless he is willing to make a heavy return to the city. If he does that it will end his scheme of selling any two hundred million dollars of Union Traction at six per cent. The market won't back him up. He can't pay twenty per cent. to the city and give universal transfers and pay six per cent. on two hundred million dollars, and everybody knows it. He has a fine scheme of making a cool hundred million out of this. Well, he can't do it. We must get the newspapers to hammer this legislative scheme of his to death. When he comes into the local council he must pay twenty or thirty per cent. of the gross receipts of his roads to the city.
