HOW A SPEAKERSHIP WAS FOUGHT FOR


Fate now and then turns jester in a bitter way, and stoops to ironies
and grinning sarcasm. Often it gives with the right hand only to take
with the left, and blinded ones are set to chop and saw and plane those
trees which in the end make gallows for their hopes. The story of the
world shows many an inadvertent Frankenstein and deeply justifies the
grewsome Mrs. Shelley.

Something less than two years prior to that evening when Senator Hanway
took the congealed Mr. Gwynn into a corner and told him how, with his
great Anaconda Airline, he should cut a figure in the selection of a
next Speaker for the House of Representatives, it had been that
statesman's fortune to so reconstruct a tariff that it gave unusual
riches and thereby unusual comfort to the dominant ones of a certain
manufacturing Northeastern State. This commonwealth at the time was
politically in the hands of the party opposed to Senator Hanway.
Mollified by the friendly tariff and anxious to mark their gratitude,
those dominant ones arose and in the following autumn elected to be
Governor of said State a middle-aged individual, eminent for obstinacy
and a kind of bovine integrity that nothing might corrupt or turn aside.
The Obstinate One of course belonged with the party of Senator Hanway.

At this pinch a vile chance befell. No sooner was the Obstinate One
given the Governorship of a State doubtful and accounted the enemy's
country, than straightway he was looked upon as White House timber by
sundry architects of politics, and thereafter his name went more or less
linked with a possible Presidency. The situation stirred the spleen of
Senator Hanway. It was discouraging to have those identical tariff