This threw light on his own suspicion that he was attached to
causes that could only, in the nature of things, be unpopular. The
disagreeable editor was right about his being out of date, only he had
got the time wrong. He had come centuries too soon; he was not too old,
but too new. Such an impression, however, would not have prevented him
from going into politics, if there had been any other way to represent
constituencies than by being elected. People might be found eccentric
enough to vote for him in Mississippi, but meanwhile where should he
find the twenty-dollar greenbacks which it was his ambition to transmit
from time to time to his female relations, confined so constantly to a
farinaceous diet? It came over him with some force that his opinions
would not yield interest, and the evaporation of this pleasing
hypothesis made him feel like a man in an open boat, at sea, who should
just have parted with his last rag of canvas.
I shall not attempt a complete description of Ransom's ill-starred
views, being convinced that the reader will guess them as he goes, for
they had a frolicsome, ingenious way of peeping out of the young man's
conversation. I shall do them sufficient justice in saying that he was
by natural disposition a good deal of a stoic, and that, as the result
of a considerable intellectual experience, he was, in social and
political matters, a reactionary.
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