THE news ran like wildfire through Imperialist circles of the City that Sir Munt had “ratted.” Moreover, the influence of a particularly honest and forcible man was such that he threatened to carry with him some of the acknowledged stays of his party. A situation at once arose that was a fitting prelude to the most significant by-election within living memory.
No matter what the moral defects of the prime minister might be, he was a very old and sure hand at the parliament game. His choice of John Endor to throw down the gage of battle to the U. P. was almost inspired. It might thunder up and down the land, but there was no disguising that a prophet had arisen to fight the cause of the oppressed Middle Class. John Endor made a fine champion for the small trader, the struggling professional man, and the people whose moderate, fixed incomes were being taxed out of existence.
The U. P. did not take long to realize the danger of its guns being spiked. Its batteries might thunder unceasingly, the real issues might be obscured in a cloud of poison gas, all its black arts might be called into play, but from the start there was no burking the fact that for once the Newspaper Ring was not going to have a walk-over.
To begin with, it was soon apparent that Cosmos Alley had shown less than its usual acumen in choosing a candidate. At the first blush, Sir Stuyvescent Milgrim, with his protection for key industries, preferential tariffs within the Empire and other shining lures for a purely mercantile community was “the sure card.” But, as John Endor’s first meeting proved, the U. P. champion was not well adapted to withstand the fire of criticism that was suddenly directed upon him from an unexpected quarter.
To the surprise of every politician in the City, the chair at Mr. Endor’s first meeting was occupied by Blackhampton’s Big Noise. For years Sir Josiah Munt had held a unique position in its public life. He was the friend of every good cause. If money had to be raised for a worthy object, a piece of legislation demanded, or a wrong denounced it was “as sure as Monday morning” that Sir Munt in his own characteristic fashion would sit at a small table with a tiny hammer in his hand in the center of the platform of the City’s largest public hall. Moreover, he would bring the occasion home in a few words peculiarly his own. In the art of “putting it over” he had locally no equal. Disdaining mere grammar, verbal finesse, minor niceties of form, at all times he knew how to speak man to man to the citizens.
At the Chairman’s table, Sir Munt was a formidable proposition. He was very much a master man. And from the outset of the fight for Blackhampton East, the friends of Sir Stuyvescent Milgrim had to keep the fact ever before them.
“Seems to some on us, gentlemen,” said Sir Munt, in the course of his opening remarks, at Mr. Endor’s first meeting, “that our Colonial friend with the old Yorkshire name, who is so keen to help us over here, might do almost as well in Ottawa, trying to persuade the Land of Promise to give a square deal to people not so happily situated. Some on us in this hall, who helped to provide his country with the money that has done so much to make her the proposition she is to-day, have not forgotten her Government’s dealings with the Grand Trunk Railway. Those of us in the city who happened to hold the stock have not forgotten how its proprietors were frozen out by penal legislation. I, for one, gentlemen, intend to keep that little episode in mind.”
This was “some” beginning and when the Chairman went on in the racy style in which all public meetings delight, to give his opinion of the U. P. and the inevitable result of government by newspaper, the first fruits of which the country had already reaped, his words fell as seed on a prepared soil. John Endor’s speech was in a different key. His platform manner had not the breadth, the force, the abounding humor of the Mayor’s, but it did not lack “punch.” There was a quality of voice, bearing and gesture which lent to a deliberate, almost leisurely choice of phrase, a moral conviction that drove every word home. The eye of the seer and the fervor of the prophet when under the discipline of the will seldom fail in their impact upon an audience of average people which often has a flair for just those qualities in which it knows itself to be lacking.
John Endor’s first meeting produced a mighty reverberation. It was heard all over the City. But it was a mere prelude to the fight. And what a fight! The “graft” that Sir Munt had feared came powerfully into play. That amazing organization, the U. P., had its unseen tentacles fixed very firmly in the vitals of the nation. It was the biggest Trust in the world’s history, beginning with the Government itself and filtering down through every department of commerce and public life to the smallest retail dealer and the humblest newsboy. For their interest and good will it had something substantial to barter.
The Universal Press was very popular. In the art of saying the direct opposite of what it did it had little to learn. It hurled the thunders of Jove against high prices, the Capitalist Ring, the extravagance of Government departments and oppressive taxation, but all its private acts, under the rose, were directed to the fostering of the very things it denounced in language so fiery. Behind everything was its fixed aim that the many should bleed for the few. Lip service to democracy was a profitable and delightfully simple game; the many, of its very nature, is easy to gull. Not having learned to think for itself, the word of its newspapers is taken for gospel. And should trouble arise, a dole from the pocket of somebody else can be relied on as a rule to repair the mischief.
So great was the power of “the machine,” when it came into play, that to the people of most experience it was very doubtful indeed whether it was humanly possible to defeat “the Ring.” The U. P. propaganda was subtle and it was all-pervading. Its subscribers were reckoned by the million, and, in return for countless benefits, for the most part quite illusory, a modified code of trade-union regulations was imposed upon its members. Some genius of Universe Building had devised a Roll of Good Citizenship. A certificate on vellum was granted to all the world and his wife, to whom in return for divers pledges, “the due observance of which could not fail to be of immense value to the State,” divers privileges were offered.
The art of creating public opinion had been raised to a pitch unknown in the history of mankind. This half-baked Democracy of the “movie” and the cheap journal had an intellectual life wholly dependent upon catchwords, of which its mentors had a never-failing supply. None the less, the corps of registered and scientifically organized subscribers to the U. P. was a truly formidable body, who it was confidently believed must turn the scale at any parliamentary election.
If you wore in your buttonhole a small purple disc emblazoned with the Prince of Wales’ feathers which was given you in exchange for a year’s subscription, paid in advance, to the Planet, the Mercury or any of the thousand-and-one daily or weekly publications of the U. P. throughout the habitable globe, you were free of a great society which had the power of conferring subtle and unexpected benefits upon you. With that talisman in your buttonhole any retail grocer between China and Peru was bound to take twopence off a half-pound packet of U. P. tea. And There Was No Tea Like It. The great ones of the earth, from the Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Augustus Bimley to Rube Rooker, the pitcher of the Chicago Pinksox and White Walker the Black Hope of South Dakota, continually affirmed that inspiring truth in tube and bus, in every newspaper, on every hoarding. There Was No Tea Like It.
It was the same with U. P. cocoa, U. P. tobacco, U. P. condensed milk, U. P. canned pears. If you bought a U. P. reach-me-down you were entitled to free membership of Blackburn Rovers, or Tottenham Hotspur, or Old Trafford, or Kennington Oval, or the U. P. Music Roll Society, or the U. P. Book Club, according to your geographical situation and your natural proclivities. Moreover, each purchase entitled you to a coupon. And if in the course of a twelve-month your coupons amounted to a given number, calculated upon a nicely graduated schedule, you were entitled to a new scale of benefits ranging from a freehold residence in the U. P. Garden City, or a five-cylindered U. P. automobile, to a free seat from three till five every Sunday afternoon at the local U. P. moving picture house.
These were material benefits. It was the aim of the U. P. not only to make the world safe for democracy, but also a Utopia for its subscribers to live in. If you wore a U. P. hat, it had a bearing on your bus fare between Cricklewood and East Finchley, or your tube ticket from Barons Court to the Elephant and Castle. If you required a set of false teeth or the best advice in regard to an early divorce you took out a three-year subscription to the Planet newspaper; if you merely needed a safety razor or a pair of button boots with glacé kid uppers, a three months’ subscription to the U. P. Literary Digest might meet the case.
With all the resources of a brand-new cosmos at his back, a full-fledged U. P. parliamentary candidate was indeed a proposition. John Endor and his friends realized that from the start; but the character of the contest and the nature of the odds nerved them for the fight. The U. P. might weave its web, but John Endor’s transparent honesty began to gain ground in spite of all that its newspapers and its “graft” could do. Blackhampton was the exact center of England in the geographical sense and at moments of crisis in the national life, when great decisions had sometimes to be taken on inadequate premises, that fact generally reacted on the minds of its citizens. In the local idiom “they could see as far through a brick wall as most.” And in the matter of a Stunt election it was well for themselves and for the country at large that they were endowed with this faculty. Otherwise, Sir Stuyvescent Milgrim must have had a walk-over.
As it was, that gentleman and those who stood behind him were soon alive to the situation. On the surface everything seemed in their favor. The arts of the U. P. were designed for such an occasion; few could hope to stand against its peculiar blend of malfeasance; but from the outset the personal equation came into play. Endor himself was a born orator; the wife he had so recently married, with her attractive presence and her quick American wits, made a brilliantly effective figure on his platform; and with the Mayor of the City, that old idol of the populace to father them, they formed a combination which in time and place was irresistible. A John Endor meeting could always put an enemy conventicle “to bed.” Nor in the matter of “sideshows,” as Sir Munt called them, was the enemy allowed to have things all his own way, as might have been the case in an agricultural constituency or a dead-alive cathedral city.
Blackhampton’s Mayor, having satisfied himself as to where the truth lay, was not a man for half measures. Promptly he set his hand to the plow. And it was set in grim earnest. The first manifestation of this fact appeared in the sky.
On the night of the procession by torchlight, just as the admired Sir Augustus Bimley was about to address the Charwomen of England from the plinth of John Bright’s statue, something went suddenly wrong with that huge illuminated sky sign—Endor Must Go—which made Market Square as bright as day.
The Lord Bishop of Blackhampton was in the middle of his prayer when the noble illumination which the prelate had referred to as a light in a great darkness began to fizzle. By the time the prayer was at an end the light had gone out.
A feeling of anticlimax smote the gathering when Sir Augustus Bimley rose to address it. Endor Must Go had been taken at its word. The delegates to the Charwoman’s Conference felt a sense of desolation, which the fervent language they now heard could not remove. Moreover, Britain’s Best, etc., was fairly under way, his eyes in a fine frenzy rolling, when suddenly there happened a strange thing.
The U. P. masterpiece in sky signs had not been merely snuffed out; it had been eclipsed. But in a literal sense it was now outshone. From above the City Hall in gigantic letters there flamed suddenly forth across Market Square the amazing legend:
JOHN ENDOR IS JANNOCK
The effect was immediate; and it was dramatic. It broke up the meeting. Indignation, moreover, ran so high that it came within an ace of producing a riot in the heart of the city. The friends of the U. P. candidate so deeply resented having such an important piece of their ordnance stolen and used against them, that some of the more turbulent spirits needed persuasion from the police to return quietly to their homes.
Next day the Blackhampton Mercury and other U. P. journals sternly demanded a public inquiry into the whole affair. None was needed really, for everybody knew the cause. All over the City it was said that “the Old Man had got at” the electricians, the chief constable and the city engineer. In the statelier words of the Planet newspaper, “Such an episode reflected the deepest discredit upon the city of Blackhampton.” All the same, it was a coup. The enemy’s Long Tom had been audaciously taken from under its nose. It was now being used with deadly effect by the other side.
An attempt was made to bring to book the culprit-in-chief, but it was not successful. Such a bird was too old to be caught napping. And for some mysterious reason the efforts that were made to repair the mischief fared no better. In spite of every precaution, the electric current of “Endor Must Go” failed night after night, while neither the British climate nor untoward circumstance was allowed to interfere with the opposition sky sign “John Endor is Jannock.”
This sinister fact brought woe to the camp of Sir Stuyvescent Milgrim. The moral effect was considerable; the whole city was kept laughing. It was just the sort of thing, said the U. P. agent, that was likely to lose the election. In the meantime, the comedy of the Firework Fizzle was worked for all it was worth by its ingenious author. At every public meeting, in alluding to it, Sir Munt was able to make new points, while the original devisers of the stunt waxed more furious. All kinds of analogies, humorously damaging, were drawn from this affair. Soon all the world began to see that every audacious stroke of badinage was one nail the more in the enemy’s coffin.
Presently a whisper arose that the greatest and most up-to-date of all Stunt elections was going to end, like the wonderful sky sign, in a fizzle. Certainly that fizzle had grown symbolical. The U. P. was in danger of being hoist with its own weapons. Even the other side—for generations Blackhampton had been notoriously a “sporting” city—did not try to minimize the humor and the significance of the case. At the end of a week of nightly fiascos, while John Endor Is Jannock seemed to wax ever brighter in the heavens and its vis-à-vis more dismally waned, the sportsmen of Blackhampton—even the dogs were held to be sportsmen in Blackhampton—took a continual delight in the affair. Sir Munt had surpassed himself. He looked like winning the election off his own bat.
Blackhampton grew prouder than ever of its Old Man. He had an amazing faculty of “getting right home.” And there were other shots in his locker. The U. P. airships, hovering proudly above Market Square, grew subject to mysterious deflations. But the greatest coup of all, the Old Man’s masterstroke, was the “running in” of Aunt Mittie, that voluble and truculent lady, on a charge of brawling, and her admonition from the bench of the City Hall.
As polling day drew on the fun grew faster and more furious. Newspaper bombast, of which the candidate of the Ring had a complete monopoly, could only be countered by the simple truth. And the clear facts of the case, presented with force and skill, were very effective. It was all very well to obscure the issues at stake by the arts of up-to-date journalism, but those in touch with the situation soon began to realize that what Sir Munt called “hot air by the cubit” had lost its virtue.
John Endor, in the meantime, was adding daily to the number of his friends. In the man himself there was something British, forthright and sincere, which did much to sustain the cause for which he was fighting. That cause was the honesty of public life. Such an ideal ceased to be possible the moment an all-powerful Trust was allowed to govern the country through its own nominees.
As defined by John Endor, there could be no mistaking the issue. Much was at stake. Democracy was not merely on its trial, it was fighting for its life. Could the shrewd sons and daughters of the Midlands, lulled like so many of their kind by false catchwords and pleasant sophistries, be roused in time from their sleep?
The question was now being asked by the wisest heads in the land. And a wave of relief flowed over the country when it was known that the new Home Secretary, his colors nailed to the mast in open defiance of the U. P. and all its works, had been returned for East Blackhampton by a majority of nearly five thousand votes.