Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/84



so they were applying a little discipline “just to show him.” If they could keep him under for a while, they would get him by and by through his ambition; he should have an office and honours. And as a foretaste of what was in store for him, in the next session the Honourable Everett Colby was made floor leader of the Republican majority in the House.

This was taking a big chance on the boy. This was making him responsible for all the dirty party work of the system, but they counted on “pride” and his “sporting blood” to see him through^ with it. And they handled him very carefully. They didn’t tell him everything, and they didn’t give him his orders harshly. They approached him through men he liked.

For instance, early in this session (1904) Percy Rockefeller came to Colby with the United States Steel’s same old “20 per cent, consent” bill which had failed in disgrace the year before. We mustn’t blame Percy Rockefeller; he seems not to have known what the bill meant. Indeed, the shocking thought is that he was innocent, and that some of his elders in Wall Street had got this boy to go to his boy friend, Everett, to ask him to introduce this bill which was so bad that even Francis Lynde Stetson, the great corporation’s greatest counsel, told Colby afterward that he did right to keep