Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/76



New Jersey. He didn’t mean to stay there, but he got into politics. He became a Wall Street broker, but it was politics that saved Everett Colby.

Now, young Colby meant to go into politics. As a “little shaver” he used to go along with his father, who campaigned in Wisconsin as a railroad man. He dreamed that when he grew up he would be a politician, and, because the dream persisted, he went in for debating in college, and afterward for the law. But it was the scenic side of the game that appealed to him, the crowd and the excitement, the fighting, the speaking and the cheers. He says so himself. He was after glory, and maybe that is all he is after now. He doesn’t pretend to know. But there lies the peculiar significance of the career of this rich young gentleman in politics. He simply wanted to go into politics — not to accomplish anything in particular; not to reform politics; not even with the thought of being practical in politics. He went in on the machine side, and he served “the party”; he put in his money; he took orders; and he obeyed the ^ boss till he saw what politics meant. Even then he didn’t revolt right away; he objected as a gentleman to doing things a gentleman couldn’t do, but he “went along” till he discovered as an insider what we have discovered from the outside: that the evils of politics, so-called, were all parts