He smiled slightly as he thought of the beginning.  In the beginning his sincerity, had been laughed at, his ardour had met rebuff.  He had gone to Richmond to meet an assembly of statesmen; he had found a body of well-intentioned, but unprofitable servants.  They were men to be led, this he saw; and as soon as his vision was adjusted he had determined within himself to become their leader.  The day when a legislator meant a statesman was done with; it meant merely a man like other men, to be juggled with by shrewder politicians or to be tricked by more dishonest ones.  They plunged into errors, and lived to retrieve them; they walked blindfold into traps, and with open eyes struggled out again.  For he found them honest and he found them faithful where their lights led them.  He remembered, with a laugh, a New Englander who, after a fruitless winter spent in scenting the iniquities of the ruling party, had angrily exclaimed that “if politicians were made up of knaves and fools, Mason and Dixon’s was the geographical line dividing the species.”  Nicholas had retorted, “If to be honest means to be a fool, we are fools!” and the New Englander had chuckled homeward.

That was his first winter and he had been nobody.  Ah, it was hard work, that beginning.  He had had to fight party plans and personal prejudices.  He had had to fight the recognised leaders of the legislature, and he had had to fight the men who pulled the strings—­the men who stood outside and hoodwinked the consciences of the powers within.  He had had to fight, and he had fought well and long.

He recalled the day of his first decisive victory—­the day when he had stood alone and the people—­the great, free people, the beginning and the end of all democracies—­had rallied to his standard.  He had won the people on that day, and he had never lost them.

But he was of the party first and last.  In his youth he had believed in the divine inspiration of the Jeffersonian principles as he believed in God.  On the Democratic leaders he had thought to find the mantle of Apostolic Succession.  He had believed as the judge believed—­with the passionate credulity of an older political age.  Time had tempered, but it had not dissipated, his fiery partisanship.  He sat to-day with the honours of a party upon him—­honours that a few months would see ratified by a voice nominally the people’s.  He laughed now as he remembered that Galt had said that in five years Dudley Webb would be the most popular man in the State.  “When Senator Withers stops delivering orations, there’ll be a call for an orator, and Webb will arise,” he had prophesied.  “They don’t need him now because the senator gets off speeches like hot cakes; but mark my words, the first time Webb is asked to make an address at the unveiling of a Confederate statue, there won’t be a man to stand up against him in Virginia.  He’s a better speaker than Withers—­only the public doesn’t know it, and there’ll be hot times when it finds it out.”