To rise to that
summit single-handed and alone would require unremitting effort
through the very best years of his manhood. His brain, his strength,
his ability, his ambitions, what were they all in the strife after
place and power, compared to the money of some commonplace adversary?
Preston Cheney, the native-born American directly descended from a
Revolutionary soldier, would be handicapped in the race with some
Michael Murphy whose father had made a fortune in the saloon
business, or who had himself acquired a competency as a police
officer.
America was not the same country which gave men like Benjamin
Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley a chance to rise from
the lower ranks to the highest places before they reached middle
life. It was no longer a land where merit strove with merit, and the
prize fell to the most earnest and the most gifted. The tremendous
influx of foreign population since the war of the Rebellion and the
right of franchise given unreservedly to the illiterate and the
vicious rendered the ambitious American youth now a toy in the hands
of aliens, and position a thing to be bought at the price set by un-
American masses.
Thoughts like these had more and more with each year filled the mind
of Preston Cheney, until, like the falling of stones and earth into a
river bed, they changed the naturally direct current of his impulses
into another channel.
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