She was silent for some time. Her face saddened with deep thought. "Yes, I'm afraid it is. The farmers can't seem to hold together. Strange, aint it? Other trades and occupations have their organizations and stand by each other, but the farmer can't seem to feel his kinship. Well, I suppose he must suffer greater hardships before he learns his lesson. But God help the poor wives while he learns! But he must learn," she ended firmly. "He must come some day to see that to stand by his fellow-man is to stand by himself. That's what civilization means, to stand by each other."
Bradley did not reply. He was looking upon her, with eyes filled with adoration. He had never heard such words from the lips of anyone. He had never seen a woman sit lost in philosophic thought like this. Her bent head seemed incredibly beautiful to him, and her simple flowing dress, royal purple. Her presence destroyed his power of thought. He simply waited for her to go on.
"The farmer lacks comparative ideas," she went on. "He don't know how poor he is. If he once finds it out, let the politicians and their masters, the money-changers, beware! But while he's finding it out, his children will grow up in ignorance, and his wife die of overwork. Oh, sometimes I lose heart." Her voice betrayed how strongly she perceived the almost hopeless immensity of the task. "The farmer must learn that to help himself, he must help others. That is the great lesson of modern society. Don't you think so?"
"I don't know. I'm losing my hold on things that I used to believe in. I've come to believe the system of protection is wrong." He said this in a tone absurdly solemn as if he had somehow questioned the law of gravity.
"Of course it is wrong," she said. "The moment I got East, I found free-trade in the air, and my uncle, who is a manufacturer, admitted it was all right in theory, but it wouldn't do as a practical measure. That finished me. I'm a woman, you know, and when a thing appears right in theory, I believe it'll be right in practice. Expediency don't count with me, you see. But tell me, do you still live in Rock River?"
"Yes, I'm only studying law down here."
"Oh, I see. I suppose you know many of the people at Rock River." She asked about Milton, whom she remembered, and about Mr. Deering. Then she returned again to the subject of the grange. "Yes, it has been already a great force, but I begin to suspect that the time is coming when it must include more or fail. I don't know just what – I aint quite clear upon it – but as it stands now, it seems inadequate."
She ended very slowly, her chin in her palm, her eyes on the floor. She made a grand picture of thought, something more active than meditation. Her dress trailed in long, sweeping lines, and against its rich dark purple folds her strong, white hands lay in vivid contrast. The most wonderful charm of her personality was her complete absorption in thought, or the speech of her visitor. She was interested in this keen-eyed, strong-limbed young fellow as a possible convert and reformer. She wanted to state herself clearly and fully to him. He was a fine listener.
"I'm afraid I see a tendency that is directly away from my ideal of a farming community. There is a force operating to destroy the grange and all other such movements."
"You mean politics?"
"No, I mean land monopoly. I believe in thickly settled farming communities, communities where every man has a small, highly cultivated farm. That's what I've been advocating and prophesying, but I now begin to see that our system of ownership in land is directly against this security, and directly against thickly-settled farming communities. The big land owners are swallowing up the small farmers, and turning them into renters or laborers. Don't you think so?"
"I hadn't though of it before, but I guess that's so – up in our county, at least."
"It's so everywhere I've been. I don't understand it yet, but I'm going to. In the meantime I am preaching union and education. I don't see the end of it, but I know" – Here she threw off her doubt – "I know that the human mind cannot be chained. I know the love of truth and justice cannot be destroyed, and marches on from age to age, and that's why I am full of confidence. The farmer is beginning to compare his mortgaged farm with the banker's mansion and his safe, and no one can see the end of his thinking. The great thing is his thinking."
She arose and gave him her hand. "I'm glad you came in. Give my regards to Mr. Deering and other friends, won't you? Tell them not to think I'm not working because I'm no longer their lecturer. You ought to be in the field. Will you read something which I'll send?" she asked, the zeal of the reformer getting the upper hand again.
"Certainly. I should be very glad to."
"I'll send you some pamphlets I've been reading." Her voice seemed to say the interview was ended, but Bradley did not go. He was struggling to speak. After a significant pause, he said in a low voice:
"I'd – I'd like to write to you – if you don't – mind."
Her eyes widened just a line, but they did not waver. "I should like to hear from you," she said cordially. "I'd like to know what you think of those pamphlets, which I'll surely send."
He had the courage to look once more into her brown eyes, with their red-gold deeps, as he shook hands. The clasp of her hand was firm and frank.
"Good-by! I hope I shall see you again. My address is always Des Moines, though I'm on the road a great deal."
Out into the open air again he passed like a man sanctified. It seemed impossible that he had not only seen her, but had retained his self-possession, and had actually dared to ask permission to write to her!
The red-gold sunlight was flaming across the snow, and the shadows stood out upon the shining expanse vivid as stains in ink. The sky, aflame with orange and gold clouds, was thrown into loftier relief by the serrate blue rim of trees that formed the western horizon. As he walked, he had a reckoning with himself. It could not longer be delayed.
He had been a boy to this day, but that hour made him a man, and he knew he was a lover. Not that he used that word, for like the farm-born man that he was, he did not say, "I love her," but he lifted his face to the sky in an unuttered resolution to be worthy her.
He had come under the spell of her womanly presence. He had seen her in her house-dress, and his admiration for her intellect and beauty had added to itself a subtle quality, which rose from the potential husbandship and fatherhood within him.
Now that he was out of her immediate presence, thoughts came thick and fast. Every word she had spoken seemed to have a magical power of arousing long trains of speculation. He walked far out into the quiet evening, walked until he grew calmer, and the emotion of the hour faded to a luminous golden dusk in his mind as the day changed into the beautiful winter night.
As he sat down at his desk, an hour later, he saw a letter lying there. It was one of Nettie's poor little school-girl love letters. A feeling of disgust and shame seized him. He crumpled the letter in his hands, and was on the point of throwing it away, when his mood changed, and he softened. By the side of Miss Wilbur poor little Nettie was a willful child.
A few days after there came to him a pamphlet directed in a woman's hand. Its title page struck him as something utterly new, but it was only the first of a flood of similar publications.
"The Coming Conflict. A Series of Lectures prophetic of the Coming Revolution of the Poor, when they will rise against the National Banks and against all Indirect Taxation."
Its dedication was marked with a pencil and he read it over and over: "To the Toiling Millions who produce all the wealth, yet because they have never controlled legislation, have been impoverished by unjust laws made in the interests of the Land-holder and the Money-changer, who seize upon and hold the surplus wealth of the nation by the same right that the slave-master held his slave, legal right and that alone, this tract is inscribed by the author."
It was Bradley's first intimation of the mighty forces beginning to stir in the deeps of American society. He found the pamphlet filled with great confusing thoughts. He confessed frankly in his letter to Miss Wilbur that he got nothing satisfactory out of it, though it made him think.
It was astonishing to himself to find his thoughts flowing out to her upon paper with the greatest ease. He was stricken with fear after he had mailed his letter, it was so bulky. He was appalled at the length of time which must pass before he might reasonably expect to hear from her. He counted the days, the hours that intervened. Her note came at last, and it made his blood leap as the clerk flung it out with a grin. "She's blessed yeh this time!" It was a red-headed clerk, and his grin, by reason of a quid of tobacco in his thin cheek, was particularly offensive. Bradley felt an impulse to call him out of his box and whip him.
When he opened the letter in his own room he felt a sort of fear. How would she reply? The letter gave out a faint perfume like that he remembered floated with her dress. It was a rather brief note, but very kind. She called his attention to two or three passages in the pamphlet, and especially asked him to read the chapters touching on the land and money questions. But the part over which he spent the most time was the paragraph at the close:
"I liked your letter very much. It shows a sincere desire for the truth. You will never stop short of the truth, I'm sure, but you will have sacrifices to make – you must expect that. I shall take great interest in your work.
"Very sincerely,"Ida Wilbur."
XIV.
BRADLEY CHANGES HIS POLITICAL VIEWS
The West had always been Republican. Its States had come into the Union as Republican States. It met the solid South with a solid North-west year after year, and it firmly believed that the salvation of the nation's life depended on its fidelity to the war traditions and on the principle of protection to American industries.
Its orators waved the bloody shirt to keep the party together, though each election placed the war and its issues farther into the background of history, and an increasing number of people deprecated the action of fanning smouldering embers into flame again. Iowa and Kansas and Nebraska were Stalwarts of the Stalwart. Kansas was the battle-ground of the old Abolition and Free Soil forces, and their traditions kept alive a love and reverence for the Republican party long after its real leaders had passed away, and long after it had ceased to be the party of the people.
Iowa was hopelessly Republican, also. A strong force in the Rebellion, dominated by New England thought, its industries predominantly agricultural, it held rigidly to its Republicanism, and trained its young men to believe that, while "all Democrats were not thieves, all thieves were Democrats," and, when pressed to the wall, admitted, reluctantly, that there were "some good men among the Democrats."
In the fall of Bradley's last year at Iowa City, another presidential campaign was coming on, but few men considered that there was any change impending. Local fights really supplied the incitement to action among the Republican leaders. There was no statement of a general principle, no discussion of economic issues by their political leaders. They carefully avoided anything like a discussion of the real condition of the people.
Rock County had been the banner Republican county. For years the Democrats of Rock County had met in annual convention to nominate a ticket which they had not the slightest expectation of electing. There was something pathetic in the habit. It was not faith – it was a sort of desperation; and yet the Republicans as regularly had their joke about it, regardless of the pathos presented in the action of a body of men thus fighting a forlorn and hopeless battle. Each year some old-fashioned Democrat dropped away into the grave, and yet the remnant met and nominated a complete ticket, and voted for it solemnly, even religiously.
The young Republicans of the county called this remnant "Free traders" and "Copperheads," exactly as if the terms were synonymous. The Republican boys of the country felt that there was something mysteriously uncanny in the term "Free Trader" (and always associated "Copperhead" with the yellow-backed rattlesnakes that made their dens in the limestone cliffs), and in their snowballing took sides with these mysterious words as shibboleths.
In truth, many of these Democrats were very thoughtful men – old-line Jeffersonians, who held to a principle of liberty. Others had been born Democrats a half-century ago, and had never been able to make any change. They continued the habit of being Democrats, just as they continued the habit of wearing fuzzy old plug hats, of old-fashioned shapes, and long, polished frock coats. Then there were a few of that perpetually cross-grained class who will never agree with anybody else if they can help it. They belonged to the Democracy because the Democrats were in the minority, and considered it wrong to belong to a majority, anyhow. Of this sort were men like Colonel Peavy and old Judd Colwell.
The Colonel had been nominated for treasurer and Colwell for sheriff on the Democratic ticket year after year, and each year the leaders of the party had prophesied decided gains, but they did not come. The State remained apparently hopelessly Republican. The forces which were really preparing for change were too far below the surface for these old-line politicians to understand and measure.
As a matter of fact, the schools and debating clubs and newspapers were preparing the whole country for a political revolution. Radicals were everywhere being educated. Men like Radbourn, who still remained nominally a Republican, and a host of other young men and progressive men were becoming disabused of the protective idea, and were ready for a revolt. There needed but a change of leadership to make a change of the relation of parties and of party names.
The Grange, which was still non-partisan, seemed not destined to play a very strong part in politics, though it was still at work wresting some advanced forms of legislation from one or the other of the old parties.
But the deeper change was one which Judge Brown and a few of the progressive men had only just dimly perceived. The war and the issues of the war were slowly drawing off. The militant was being lost in the problems of the industrial. Each year a larger mass of people practically said, "The issues of to-day are not the issues of twenty-five years ago. The bloody shirt is an anachronism."
Here and there a young man coming to maturity caught the spirit of the new era, and turned away from the talk of the solid South, and addressed himself to a consideration of the questions of taxation and finance. These men formed a growing power in the State, and chafed under the restraint of their leaders.
And above all, death, the great pacificator, unlooser of bonds, and aider of progress, was doing his work. The old men were dying and carrying their prejudices with them, while each year thousands of young voters, to whom the war was an echo of passion, sprang to the polls and faced the future policy of the parties, not their past. Not only all over the State of Iowa, but all over the West, they were silent factors, in many cases kept so by the all-compelling power of party ties; but they represented a growing power, and they were to become leaders in their turn.
This spreading radicalism reached Bradley in the quiet of his life in Iowa City. The young fellows in the school were debating it with fierce enthusiasm, and several of them capitulated. They all recognized that the liquor question once out of the way, the tariff was the next great State issue. At the Judge's suggestion, Bradley did not return to Rock River during vacation, but spent the time reading with a prominent lawyer of the town who had a very fine law library.
He did not care to return particularly, for the quiet studious life he led, almost lonely, had grown to be very pleasant to him. He read a great deal outside his law, and enjoyed his days as he had never done before. Unconsciously he had fallen into a mode of life and a habit of thought which were unfitting him for a politician's career. He gave very little thought to that, however; his ambition for the time had taken a new form. He wished to be well read; to be a scholar such as he imagined Miss Wilbur to be.
He began reading for that purpose, and kept at it because he really had the literary perception. He wrote to her of his reading; and when in her reply she mentioned some book which he had not read, he searched for it, and read it as soon as possible. In this quiet way he spent his days, the happiest he had ever known.
He had just two disturbing factors: one was Nettie's relation to him, and the other was his desire to see Miss Wilbur. Nettie wrote quite often at first, letters all very much alike, and very short, sending love and kisses. She was not a good letter writer, and even under the inspiration of love could not write above two pages of repetitious matter. "It's dreadfully hard work to write," she kept saying. "I wish you was to home. When are you coming back?"
It was very curious to see the different way in which he came to the writing of letters to these two persons.
"Dear Nettie," he would begin, with a scowling brow, "I can't write any oftener, because in the first place I'm too busy, and in the second place nothing happened here that you would care to hear about. I don't know when I'll be home. I ought to finish my course here. No, I don't expect you to mope. I expect you to have a good time, go to parties and dances all you want to."
But when Miss Wilbur's letters arrived, he devoured them with tremulous eagerness, and sat up half the night writing an elaborate answer, while Nettie's letters lay unanswered for days.
"Miss Ida Wilbur, Dear Miss." (That was the way he addressed her. He was afraid to call her Dear Miss Wilbur, it seemed a little too familiar.) In the body of his letters there was no expressed word of his regard for her. It was only put indirectly into the length of his letters, and was shown in the eager promptness of his reply. She wrote kindly, scholarly replies, giving him a great deal to think about. Her letters were very far apart, however, as she was moving about so much. She advised him to read the modern books.
"I'm always on the wrong side of everything," she wrote once, "so I'm on the side of the modern novel. I champion Mr. Howells. Are you reading his story in the Century? I like it because it isn't like anybody else; and Mr. Cable, too, you should read, and Henry James and Miss Jewett; they're all of this modern school, that most Western people know nothing about. The West is so afraid of its own judgments. My friends go about praising the classics because they know it's safe to do so, I suppose, while I am an image breaker to them. Mr. Howells says the idea of progress in art does not admit of the conception that any art is finished. Just like the question of social advance, there is always new work to be done and new victories to be won."
But more often she wrote upon economic subjects, as being more impersonal; and then her wish to make Bradley a reformer was greater than her desire to make him a lover of modern art.
"The spirit of reform is beginning to move over the face of the great deep," she wrote at another time. "No one who travels about as I do, can fail to see it. The labor question in the cities, and the farmer question in the country, will soon be the great disturbing factors in politics. The protective theory will go down: it is based on a privilege; and the new war, like the old war, is going to be against all kinds of special privileges."
It was with a peculiar feeling of pain and relief that he read Miss Wilbur's renunciation of her home-market idea. It seemed as if something sweet and fine had gone with it; and yet it strengthened him, for he had come to believe that a home-market built up by legislation was unnatural and a mistake. Judge Brown's constant hammerings had left a mark.
He wrote to her something of his hesitation, and she replied substantially that there was no abandonment of the home-market idea; only the method of bringing it about had changed. She had come to believe in what was free and natural, not what was artificial and forced.
"If you will study the past," she went on, "you will find that advance in legislation has always been in the direction of less law, less granting of special privileges. Take the time of the Stuarts, for example, when the king granted monopolies in the sale of all kinds of goods. It is abhorrent to us, and yet I suppose those protected merchants believed their monopolies to be rights. Slowly these rights have come to be considered wrongs, and the people have abolished them. So all other monopolies will be abolished, when people come to see that it is an infringement of liberty to have a class of men enjoying any special privilege whatever. The way to build up a home-market is to make our own people able to buy what they want.
"There never was a time when our own people were not too poor to buy what they wanted. Goods lie rotting in our Eastern factories, and we export many products which the farmer would be very glad to consume, if he were able. The farmer is poor; but it isn't because he needs protection, it isn't because he doesn't produce enough – it's because what he does produce is taken from him by bankers and corporations."
Bradley read her letters over and over again. Every word which she uttered had more significance than words from any one else. She seemed a marvellous being to him. He looked eagerly in every letter for some personal expression, but she seemed carefully to avoid that; and though his own letters were filled with personalities, she remained studiously impersonal. She replied cordially and kindly, but with a reserve that should have been a warning to him; but he would not accept warnings now – he was too deeply moved. Under the influence of her letters he developed a tremendous capacity for work. The greatest stimulus in the world had come to him, and remained with him. If it should be withdrawn at any time, it would weaken him. He did not speculate on that.