Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/115

 measure, this same bipartizan machine sought to pass it over his veto, and none was more active in the effort than were the leaders of his own party in the House.

The supreme effort was made on the last night of the session, amidst one of those riots which mark the dissolution of our deliberative legislative bodies. The lobbyists for the measure were quite shameless that night, as they were on most nights, no doubt; almost as shameless as the legislators themselves. The House was in its shirt-sleeves; and there was the rude horse-play of country bumpkins; paper wads were flying, now and then some member sent hurtling through the hot air his file of printed legislative bills, and all the while there was that confusion of sound, laughter, and oaths and snatches of song, a sort of bedlam, in which laws were being enacted—laws that must be respected and even revered, because of their sacred origin. The leaders were serious, but worried; the expressions of their drawn, tense, nervous faces were unhappy in suspicion and fear, and, perhaps, because of uneasy consciences. The speaker sat above them, pale and haggard, rapping his splintered sounding-board with a broken gavel, rapping persistently and futilely. And as the time drew near when the gas bill was to come on for consideration, the nervous tension was intensified, and evil hung almost palpably in the hot, close air of that chamber. Those who have had experience of legislative bodies, and have by practice learned something of political aëroscopy, can always tell when "something is coming off";