His face, broad-featured, colorless, and beardless as a boy’s, was either a blank or an impenetrable mask.  There was no convincement in the lack-luster gaze of the small, porcine eyes; no eloquence in the harsh, nasal tones of the untrained voice, or in the ponderous and awkward wavings of the beam-like arms.  None the less, before he had uttered a dozen halting sentences he was carrying the audience with him step by step; moving the great concourse of listeners with his commonplace periods as a mellifluous Hawk could never hope to move it.

Loring saw the miracle in the throes of its outworking; saw and felt it in his own proper person, and sought in vain to account for it.  Was there some subtile magnetism in this great hulk of a man that made itself felt in spite of its hamperings?  Or was it merely that the people, weary of empty rhetoric and unkept promises, were ripe to welcome and to follow any man whose apparent earnestness and sincerity atoned for all his lacks?

Explain it as he might, Loring soon assured himself that the Honorable Jasper G. Bucks was laying hold of the sentiment of the audience as though it were a thing tangible to be grasped by the huge hands.  Unlike Hawk, whose speech flamed easily into denunciation when it touched on the alien corporations, he counseled moderation and lawful reprisals.  Land syndicates, railroads, foreign capital in whatever employment, were prime necessities in any new and growing commonwealth.  The province of the people was not to wreck the ship, but to guide it.  And the remedy for all ills lay in controlling legislation, faithfully and rigidly enforced.

“My friends:  I’m only a plain, hard-handed farmer, as those of you who are my fellow townsmen can testify.  But I’ve seen what you’ve seen, and I’ve suffered what you’ve suffered.  Year after year we send our representatives to the legislature, and what comes of it?  Why, these corporations, looking only to their own interests, as they’re in duty bound to do, buys ’em if they can.  You can’t blame ’em for that; it’s business—­their business.  But it is our business, as citizens of this great commonwealth, to prevent it.  We have good laws on our statute books, but we need more of ’em; laws for control, with plain, honest men at the capital, in the judiciary, in every root and branch of the executive, to enforce ’em.  With such laws, and such men to see that they are executed, there wouldn’t be any more extortion, any more raising of the rates of transportation on the produce of our ranches and farms merely because the eastern market for that particular product happened to jump a few cents on the dollar.

“No, my friends; plain, hard-handed farmer though I be, I can see what will follow an honest election of the people, by the people, and for the people.  The State can be—­it ought to be—­sovereign within its own boundaries.  If we rise up as one man next Tuesday and put a ticket into the ballot-box that says we are going to make it so, and keep it so, you’ll see a new commodity tariff put into effect on the Western Pacific Railroad the day after.”