Nor was the admiration undeserved. As the new three-cornered
contest developed it became apparent to others besides his devoted
kinsman that there was more in Horne Fisher than had ever met the
eye. It was clear that his outbreak by the family fireside had been
but the culmination of a long course of brooding and studying on the
question. The talent he retained through life for studying his
subject, and even somebody else's subject, had long been
concentrated on this idea of championing a new peasantry against a
new plutocracy. He spoke to a crowd with eloquence and replied to an
individual with humor, two political arts that seemed to come to him
naturally. He certainly knew much more about rural problems than
either Hughes, the Reform candidate, or Verner, the Constitutional
candidate. And he probed those problems with a human curiosity, and
went below the surface in a way that neither of them dreamed of
doing. He soon became the voice of popular feelings that are never
found in the popular press. New angles of criticism, arguments that
had never before been uttered by an educated voice, tests and
comparisons that had been made only in dialect by men drinking in
the little local public houses, crafts half forgotten that had come
down by sign of hand and tongue from remote ages when their fathers
were free--all this created a curious and double excitement.
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