Presently the flood-gates of talk were unloosed, and the conservatives
began to be heard. Opposition was futile because it was too late, they
claimed. A young Irishman, primed for the occasion, jumped to his feet with
an impassioned harangue that pedestaled Ridgway as the Washington of the
West. He showed how one man, in coalition with the labor-unions, had
succeeded in carrying the State against the big copper company; how he had
elected senators and governors, and legislators and judges. If one man
could so cripple the octopus, what could the best blood of the State,
standing together, not accomplish? He flung Patrick Henry and Robert Emmet
and Daniel Webster at their devoted
heads, demanding liberty or death with the bridled eloquence of his race.
But Ridgway was not such a tyro at the game of politics as to depend upon
speeches for results. His fine hand had been working quietly for months to
bring the malcontents into one camp, shaping every passion to which men are
heir to serve his purpose. As he looked down the table he could read in the
faces before him hatred, revenge, envy, fear, hope, avarice, recklessness,
and even love, as the motives which he must fuse to one common end.
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