they should know he hadn’t a ticket.
Philip had to walk some five miles before he reached a little station,
where he could wait for a train, and he had ample time for reflection.
At first he was full of vengeance on the company. He would sue it. He
would make it pay roundly. But then it occurred to him that he did not
know the name of a witness he could summon, and that a personal fight
against a railway corporation was about the most hopeless in the world.
He then thought he would seek out that conductor, lie in wait for him at
some station, and thrash him, or get thrashed himself.
But as he got cooler, that did not seem to him a project worthy of a
gentleman exactly. Was it possible for a gentleman to get even with such
a fellow as that conductor on the letter’s own plane? And when he came
to this point, he began to ask himself, if he had not acted very much
like a fool. He didn’t regret striking the fellow–he hoped he had left
a mark on him. But, after all, was that the best way? Here was he,
Philip Sterling, calling himself a gentleman, in a brawl with a vulgar
conductor, about a woman he had never seen before. Why should he have
put himself in such a ridiculous position? Wasn’t it enough to have
offered the lady his seat, to have rescued her from an accident, perhaps
from death? Suppose he had simply said to the conductor, “Sir, your
conduct is brutal, I shall report you.” The passengers, who saw the
affair, might have joined in a report against the conductor, and he might
really have accomplished something. And, now! Philip looked at leis
torn clothes, and thought with disgust of his haste in getting into a
fight with such an autocrat.
At the little station where Philip waited for the next train, he met a
man–who turned out to be a justice of the peace in that neighborhood,
and told him his adventure. He was a kindly sort of man, and seemed very
much interested.
“Dum ’em,” said he, when he had heard the story.
“Do you think any thing can be done, sir?”
“Wal, I guess tain’t no use. I hain’t a mite of doubt of every word you
say. But suin’s no use. The railroad company owns all these people
along here, and the judges on the bench too. Spiled your clothes! Wal,
‘least said’s soonest mended.’ You haint no chance with the company.”
When next morning, he read the humorous account in the Patriot and
Clarion, he saw still more clearly what chance he would have had before
the public in a fight with the railroad company.
Still Philip’s conscience told him that it was his plain duty to carry
the matter into the courts, even with the certainty of defeat.
He confessed that neither he nor any citizen had a right to consult his
own feelings or conscience in a case where a law of the land had been
violated before his own eyes. He confessed that every citizen’s first
duty in such case is to put aside his own business and devote his time
and his best efforts to seeing that the infraction is promptly punished;
and he knew that no country can be well governed unless its citizens as
a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians
of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its
execution, nothing more. As a finality he was obliged to confess that he
was a bad citizen, and also that the general laxity of the time, and the
absence of a sense of duty toward any part of the community but the
individual himself were ingrained in him, am he was no better than the
rest of the people.
The result of this little adventure was that Philip did not reach Ilium
till daylight the next morning, when he descended sleepy and sore, from a
way train, and looked about him. Ilium was in a narrow mountain gorge,
through which a rapid stream ran. It consisted of the plank platform on