Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/79



Of course, young Colby -had to spend some of his own money, and he did. He was all right, Colby was. In the next year Lentz offered him the senatorship from Essex. That was too much. The young man, modest now, was sure then that he could not be a senator. In the first place he was under the constitutional age. That didn’t matter. Lentz could “ have that fixed in the Manual,” where the statistics of legislators are kept. This sounded a little queer, like a rather unusual north wind or a bad road to Newark, noticeable, but still a perfectly natural phenomenon. Colby refused to go to the senate; but he consented to go to the assembly, so Lentz had him nominated, and elected, an assemblyman from Essex.

The education of this young legislator was begun promptly, and it resembled very closely the course of his education as a boy. He saw things with his eyes long before he saw them with his mind; he saw facts separately, but failed to combine them into the truth. He failed, as so many of us fail, for want of imagination, and his story is the story of thousands of young men who go into politics and go along till some day they wake up and find that they are part of a corrupted government.

One day, early in the session, Sam Dickinson asked Assemblyman Colby to introduce certain