up the pasteboards and throw 'em on the floor and try to grab the pot.
They won't play the game!"

"That's it exactly!" the Governor affirmed.

Senator Corson patted Morrison's arm. "Now that you're in politics for
yourself, Stewart, you can see the point, can't you?"

"I don't think I'm in politics, sir," demurred the mayor, smiling
ingenuously. "At any rate, there isn't much politics in _me!_"

"But the game must be played by the rules!" Senator Corson spoke with the
finality of an oracle.

"If you don't think that way," persisted Governor North, nettled by
Morrison's hesitancy in jumping into the ring with his own party, "what
_do_ you think?"

"I wouldn't presume," drawled Stewart, "to offer political opinions to
gentlemen of your experience. However, now that you ask me a blunt
question, I'm going to reply just as bluntly--but as a business man! I
believe that running the affairs of the people on the square is
business--it ought to be made good business. Governor North, you're at the
head of the biggest corporation in our state. That corporation is the
state itself. And I don't believe the thing ought to be run as a
game--naming the game politics."

"That's the only way the thing can be run--and you've got to stand by your
own party when it's running the state. You need a little lesson in
politics, Morrison, and I'm going to show you--"