Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/114

 was that no one seemed to care, or if a few did care, they did not know what to do about it. It was a joke among the newspaper men, who had little respect for the men who filled the positions of power and responsibility; the wonder was, indeed, after such association, that they had any respect left for anything in the world. Only the other day, reading Walt Whitman's terrific arraignment of the powers that were in control of the government of the nation in Buchanan's time, his awful catalogue of the sorts of men who composed the directorate of affairs,—it may be read in his prose works by those who wish,—I was struck by the similarity in this respect of that time with that which immediately preceded the newer and better time of the moral awakening in America. Altgeld was one of the forerunners of this time; and, in accordance with the universal law of human nature, it was his fate to be misunderstood and ridiculed and hated, even by many in his own party. He was far in the van in most ways, so far that it was impossible for his own party to follow him. It did not follow him in his opposition to a bill which was passed in the General Assembly to permit of the consolidation of gas companies in Chicago; the machines of the two parties were working well together in the legislature—in one of those bipartizan alliances which were not to be understood until many years later, and even then not to be understood so very clearly, since most of our cities have been governed since by such alliances, in the interest of similar gas companies and other public-utility corporations—and when the Governor vetoed their evil