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In person he was most admirably adapted for the role of statesman. He had a figure fit to set off a toga, a brow that might have worn a crown with dignity. As an orator he had no equal in Congress or, for that matter, out of it. He was a burning mountain of eloquence, a veritable human Vesuvius from whom, at will, flowed rhetoric or invective, satire or sentiment, as lava might flow from a living volcano. His mind spawned sonorous phrases as a roe shad spawns eggs. He was in all outward regards a shape of a man to catch the eye, with a voice to cajole the senses as with music of bugles, and an oratory to inspire. Moreover, the destiny which shaped his ends had mercifully denied him that which is a boon to common men but a curse to public men. Jason Mallard was without a sense of humour. He never laughed at others; he never laughed at himself. Certain of our public leaders have before now fallen into the woful error of doing one or both of these things. Wherefore they were forever after called humourists–and ruined. When they said anything serious their friends took it humorously, and when they said anything humorously their enemies took it seriously. But Congressman Mallard was safe enough there.

Being what he was–a handsome bundle of selfishness, coated over with a fine gloss of seeming humility, a creature whose every instinct was richly mulched in self-conceit and yet one who simulated a deep devotion for mankind at large–he couldn’t make either of these mistakes.

Upon a time the presidential nomination of his party–the dominant party, too–had been almost within his grasp. That made his losing it all the more bitter. Thereafter he became an obstructionist, a fighter outside of the lines of his own party and not within the lines of the opposing party, a leader of the elements of national discontent and national discord, a mouthpiece for all those who would tear down the pillars of the temple because they dislike its present tenants. Once he had courted popularity; presently–this coming after his re-election to a sixth term–he went out of his way to win unpopularity. His invectives ate in like corrosives, his metaphors bit like adders. Always he had been like a sponge to sop up adulation; now he was to prove that when it came to withstanding denunciation his hide was the hide of a rhino.

This war came along, and after more than two years of it came our entry into it. For the most part, in the national capital and out of it, artificial lines of partisan division were wiped out under a tidal wave of patriotism. So far as the generality of Americans were concerned, they for the time being were neither Democrats nor Republicans; neither were they Socialists nor Independents nor Prohibitionists. For the duration of the war they were Americans, actuated by a common purpose and stirred by a common danger. Afterward they might be, politically speaking, whatever they chose to be, but for the time being they were just Americans. Into this unique condition Jason Mallard projected himself, an upstanding reef of opposition to break the fine continuity of a mighty ground swell of national unity and national harmony.

Brilliant, formidable, resourceful, seemingly invulnerable, armoured in apparent disdain for the contempt and the indignation of the masses of the citizenship, he fought against and voted against the breaking off of diplomatic relations with Germany; fought against the draft, fought against the war appropriations, fought against the plans for a bigger navy, the plans for a great army; fought the first Liberty Loan and the second; he fought, in December last, against a declaration of war with Austro-Hungary. And, so far as the members of Congress were concerned, he fought practically single-handed.

His vote cast in opposition to the will of the majority meant nothing; his voice raised in opposition meant much. For very soon the avowed pacifists and the secret protagonists of Kultur, the blood-eyed anarchists and the lily-livered dissenters, the conscientious objectors and the conscienceless I.W.W. group, saw in him a buttress upon which to stay their cause. The lone wolf wasn’t a lone wolf any longer–he had a pack to rally about him, yelping approval of his every word. Day by day he grew stronger and day by day the sinister elements behind him grew bolder, echoing his challenges against the Government and against the war. With practically every newspaper in America, big and little, fighting him; with every influential magazine fighting him; with the leaders of the Administration fighting him–he nevertheless loomed on the national sky line as a great sinister figure of defiance and rebellion.