Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/99



their own representatives wouldn’t, nay couldn’t, represent them! One by one they sounded them only to see that no representative of theirs dared touch their bill. Why?

Everett Colby was learning why. The men of Orange decided to ask him to take up their bill, and the Newark fighters were to support them. Would Colby do it ? He didn’t know. Before his fellow-citizens asked him, he heard of their intentions and he wasn’t sure what he should do. He was aware of the feeling between the corporations and the people, not only in Orange but everywhere, and his disposition was not to take a side, but to listen to both, study the subject, and do the fair thing.

One evening ex-Governor Murphy gave a dinner. “Everybody” was there; all the business and political leaders and others, quite a crowd. When they rose from the table Colby went up to Tom McCarter to get the trolley side of the franchise question. He heard, he said, that the New England Society of Orange had a limited franchise bill to offer to the legislature, and wouldn’t McCarter like to talk it over with him (Colby) ?

“Now, you know,” said Colby to me, “they could have fooled me easily. If they had had any tact, and had given me any reasonable argument, I think, in my ignorance, I would have been