and even of Perry Blackwood that must have been without license or bounds.  I can recall only fragments of my remarks:  Greenhalge wanted to be mayor, and was willing to put the stigma of slander on his native city in order to gain his ambition; Krebs had made a failure of his profession, of everything save in bringing shame on the place of his adoption; and on the single occasion heretofore when he had been before the public, in the School Board fiasco, the officials indicted on his supposed evidence had triumphantly been vindicated—­, Guptill was gaining money and notoriety out of his spleen; Perry Blackwood was acting out of spite....  I returned to Krebs, declaring that he would be the boss of the city if that ticket were elected, demanding whether they wished for a boss an agitator itching for power and recognition....

I was conscious at the moment only of a wild relief and joy in letting myself go, feelings heightened by the clapping and cheers with which my characterizations were received.  The fact that the cheers were mingled with hisses merely served to drive me on.  At length, when I had returned to Krebs, the hisses were redoubled, angering me the more because of the evidence they gave of friends of his in my audiences.  Perhaps I had made some of these friends for him!  A voice shouted out above the uproar:—­“I know about Krebs.  He’s a d—­d sight better man than you.”  And this started a struggle in a corner of the hall....  I managed, somehow, when the commotion had subsided, to regain my poise, and ended by uttering the conviction that the common sense of the community would repudiate the Citizens Union and all it stood for....

But that night, as I lay awake listening to the street noises and staring at the glint from a street lamp on the brass knob of my bedstead, I knew that I had failed.  I had committed the supreme violation of the self that leads inevitably to its final dissolution....  Even the exuberant headlines of the newspapers handed me by the club servant in the morning brought but little relief.

On the Saturday morning before the Tuesday of election there was a conference in the directors’ room of the Corn National.  The city reeked with smoke and acrid, stale gas, the electric lights were turned on to dispel the November gloom.  It was not a cheerful conference, nor a confident one.  For the first time in a collective experience the men gathered there were confronted with a situation which they doubted their ability to control, a situation for which there was no precedent.  They had to reckon with a new and unsolvable equation in politics and finance,—­the independent voter.  There was an element of desperation in the discussion.  Recriminations passed.  Dickinson implied that Gorse with all his knowledge of political affairs ought to have foreseen that something like this was sure to happen, should have managed better the conventions of both great parties.  The railroad counsel retorted that it had been as much Dickinson’s fault as his.  Grierson expressed a regret that I had broken out against the reformers; it had reacted, he said,—­and this was just enough to sting me to retaliate that things had been done in the campaign, chiefly through his initiative, that were not only unwise, but might land some of us in the penitentiary if Krebs were elected.