The President | Page 7

in his day.
Also, personally, he had been the soul of ignorance and religion, and of
a narrowness touching Scriptural things that oft got him into trouble.
Grandfather Hanway read his Bible and believed it. He held that the
earth was flat; that it had four corners; and that the sun went around the
earth. He replied to a neighbor who assured him that the earth revolved,
by placing a pan of water on his gate-post. Not a drop was spilled, not a
spoonful missing, in the morning. He showed this to the astronomical
neighbor as refutatory of that theory of revolution.
"For," said Grandfather Hanway, with a logical directness which
among the world's greatest has more than once found parallel, "if the
y'earth had turned over in the night like you allow, that water would
have done run out."
When the astronomical one undertook a counter argument, Grandfather
Hanway fell upon him with the blind, unreasoning fury of a holy war
and beat him beyond expression. After that Grandfather Hanway was
left undisturbed in his beliefs and their demonstrations, and tilled his
sour acres and begat a son.
The son, Hiram Hanway, was sly and lazy, and not wanting in a gift for
making money that was rather the fruit of avarice than any general
length and breadth and depth of native wit. Having occasion to visit, as
a young man, the little humdrum capital of his State, he stayed there,
and engaged in the trade of lobbyist before the name was coined. He,

too, married, and had children--Patrick Henry Hanway and Barbara
Hanway. These his offspring were given a peculiar albeit not always a
sumptuous bringing up.
When Patrick Henry Hanway was about the age of Oliver Twist at the
time Bill Sykes shoved him through the window, Hiram Hanway
caused him to be appointed page in the State Senate. There, for eight
years, he lived in the midst of all that treason and mendacity and
cowardice and rapacity and dishonor which as raw materials are ground
together to produce laws for a commonwealth. He learned early that the
ten commandments have no bearing on politics and legislation, and was
taught that part of valor which, basing itself on greed and cunning and
fear, is called discretion, and consists in first running from an enemy
and then hiding from pursuit. Altogether, those eight years might have
been less pernicious in their influence had Patrick Henry Hanway
passed them with the chain gang, and he emerged therefrom, to cast his
first vote, treacherous and plausible and boneless and false--as
voracious as a pike and as much without a principle.
Patrick Henry Hanway did not follow in the precise footsteps of his sire.
He resolved to make his money by pulling and hauling at legislation;
but the methods should be changed. He would improve upon his father,
and instead of pulling and hauling from the lobby, he would pull and
haul from within. The returns were surer; also it was easier to knead
and mold and bake one's loaf of legislation as a member, with a seat in
Senate or Assembly, than as some unassigned John Smith, who, with a
handful of bribes and a heart full of cheap intrigue, must do his work
from the corridor. A legislative seat was a two-edged sword to cut both
ways. You could trade with it, using it as a bribe, bartering vote for
vote; that was one edge. Or you could threaten with it, promising nay
for nay, and thus compel some member to save your bill to save his
own; that was the other edge. A mere bribe from the lobby owned but
the one edge; it was like a cavalry saber; you might make the one slash
at a required vote, with as many chances of missing as of cutting it
down. Every argument, therefore, pointed to a seat; whereat Patrick
Henry Hanway bent himself to its acquirement, and at the age of
twenty-six he was sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution and

told to vote in the Assembly. In that body he flourished for ten years,
while his manhood mildewed and his pockets filled.
The native State of Patrick Henry Hanway was a moss-grown member
of the republic and had been one of the original thirteen. It possessed
with other impedimenta a moss-grown aristocracy that borrowed
money, devoured canvasbacks, drank burgundy, wore spotless tow in
summer, clung to the duello, and talked of days of greatness which had
been before the war. It carried moss-grown laws upon its statute books
which arranged for the capture of witches, the flogging of Quakers at a
cart's tail, the boring of Presbyterian tongues with red-hot irons, and the
punishment of masters who oppressed their hapless slaves with terrapin
oftener than three times