I


George Colfax was in an outraged frame of mind, and properly so.
Politically speaking, George was what might be called, for lack of a
better term, a passive reformer. That is, he read religiously the New
York _Nation_, was totally opposed to the spoils system of party
rewards, and was ostensibly as right-minded a citizen as one would
expect to find in a Sabbath day's journey. He subscribed one dollar a
year to the civil-service reform journal, and invariably voted on
Election Day for the best men, cutting out in advance the names of the
candidates favored by the Law and Order League of his native city, and
carrying them to the polls in order to jog his memory. He could talk
knowingly, too, by the card, of the degeneracy of the public men of
the nation, and had at his finger-ends inside information as to the
manner in which President This or Congressman That had sacrificed the
ideals of a vigorous manhood to the brass idol known as a second term.
In fact, there was scarcely a prominent political personage in the
country for whom George had a good word in every-day conversation. And
when the talk was of municipal politics he shook his head with a
profundity of gloom which argued an utterly hopeless condition of
affairs--a sort of social bottomless pit.

And yet George was practically passive. He voted right, but, beyond
his yearly contribution of one dollar, he did nothing else but cavil
and deplore. He inveighed against the low standards of the masses, and
went on his way sadly, making all the money he could at his private
calling, and keeping his hands clean from the slime of the political
slough. He was a censor and a gentleman; a well-set-up, agreeable,