Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/93



him, to lay bare his motives is one of the convincing traits of the man. He is instinctively honest, and his candour is obvious.

“You’ll hear,” he told me, “that I wanted to be Speaker, and that my defeat made me turn. There is something in that. I think you understand that I don’t want to think that that was all, and, as I recall it, I don’t think it was decisive, nor just that alone. That was only one of a score of things that made me see — and drove me to act. I simply don’t know the exact weight of any one thing.”

All he knows is, that from seeing things separately, with his eyes, he came to see them all together with his mind. His friends put into his head the idea of the Speakership in the next session (1905). “I didn’t care much,” he said. “I felt I hadn’t done very well, and I was willing to wait.” But he wrote to his colleagues, and enough of “the boys” promised him their support to elect him. When Major Lentz got wind of it, he told Colby he couldn’t have the Speakership. This was the System at work; the House leader hadn’t “made good”; he was not yet “safe”; but that isn’t what the boss said. Lentz said Colby mustn’t run because he couldn’t be elected. With those letters in his pocket, Colby knew it wasn’t his colleagues that would make