The delegates stared at him for a few seconds when he paused, and then a tumult of applause greeted his utterance.
“I ask you, gentlemen, whether Governor Harwood--and you know him well and how he has been chosen--will ever sign a bill that will take profit from the hands of his political makers even to give that profit to the people who are the rightful owners?”
This time men were silent, but he knew what they thought from the manner in which they looked at him.
“I do not need to tell you that the veto of a bill by a governor means, in most cases, its death. Gentlemen, it would be polite and kind and gracious of you to bow low here to-day and hand up the nomination to the amiable Governor Harwood. But with the conditions as they are in this state are you going to be polite, merely, while the hearses are rumbling down your streets? I have no way of knowing how many of you into whose eyes I am looking have seen death enter your own homes from the taps of this much-promising, little-accomplishing water syndicate. But if you have seen death touch your loved ones, or if you go home from here and behold fever ravaging your community, it will be poor consolation to your soul to remember that at least you were polite to an amiable man who desired the honor of a renomination.”
The faces of the convention showed that this blunt yet shrewd appeal to the individual antagonism of men had produced profound effect.
“But that is only one feature of what this state demands and needs, gentlemen,” was Farr's ringing declaration. “This struggle for pure water has opened a broad avenue. The towns and cities of this state must take back into their own hands the properties and franchises which have been mismanaged by the men to whose hands unwise gift by the people has intrusted the people's own. We need a man in the Big Chair of State who will stand with the people in this crusade!”
This amazing declaration in open convention produced as much consternation on the platform as if Farr had dropped a bomb there.
He uttered something which was worse than mere political rebellion: he was proposing to take for the people properties which constituted the backbone of the oligarchy's power in state affairs.