Part 4 (1/2)
”Colonel Walton,” said I, ”did the whipping hurt you rown-up, ”they whipped usted”
An old lady in Philadelphia, whilst I was at school, heard ious old lady--and said to me, ”Henry, my son, you should be ashamed to speak of that old villain or confess that you ever knew hi history
It was ment of her fancy and prejudice, and I repeated it to Colonel Walton the next ti--I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was then three score and ten--and he cried, ”That old hag! Good Lord! Don't they ever die!”
Seeing every day the uished public ht into direct acquaintance by the easy intercourse of hotel life, destroyed any reverence I ht have acquired for official station Familiarity may not always breed conteed the brow of a senator I knew the White House too well to be irandeur without and rather bizarre furnishments within
VII
I have declainoble trade of politics, the collective dishonesty of parties and the vulgarities of the self-exploiting professional office hunters Parties are parties
Professional politics and politicians are probably neither worse nor better--barring their pretensions--than other lines of hureeable on the stage of the playhouse; the politician on the highways and the hustings, which constitute his playhouse--all the world a stage--neither to be seriously bla an asset, becomes, as it were, a second nature
The ht have saved the Union and averted the War of Sections were on either side professional politicians, with here and there an unselfish, far-seeing, patrioticon opposing sides of party lines The two most potential of the party leaders were Mr Davis and Mr Seward The South ht have seen and known that the one hope of the institution of slavery lay in the Union However it ended, disunion led to abolition The world--the whole trend of ainst slavery But politics, based on party feeling, is a game of blindman's buff And then--here I show myself a son of Scotland--there is a destiny ”What is to be,” says the predestinarian Mother Goose, ”will be, though it never coic of the irrepressible conflict--only it did come to pass--and for four years eneous, practical and intelligent, fought to a finish a fight over a quiddity; both devoted to liberty, order and law, neither seeking any real change in the character of its organic contract
Human nature remains ever the same These days are very like those days
We have had fifty years of a restored Union The sectional fires have quite gone out Yet behold the scheenerative Most of theree at once that all government is more or less a failure; society as fraudulent as the satirists describe it; yet, e turn to the uplift--particularly the professional uplift--what do we find but the sa as ”friends of the people,” preaching the pussy gospel of ”sweetness and light?”
”Words, words, words,” says Hah disheartening experience to a realizing sense of the futility of printer's ink in to suspect the futility of art and letters Words however cleverly writ on paper are after all but words ”In a nation of blind ” In a nation of undiscriitator is apt to drown the voice of the states everybody to read, nobody to think; and as a consequence--the rule of nuislation, state and Federal, beco to hounds and horns All this, which was true in the fifties, is true to-day
Under the pretense of ”liberalizing” the Governanic character to whined to pro loosened by schemes of reforence enlightened by experience, and conviction supported by self-control, interposing to save the representative system of the Constitution from the onward march of the proletariat
One cynic tells us that ”A statesman is a politician who is dead,” and another cynic varies the epigram to read ”A politician out of a job”
Patriotisive us men,” but the parties say ”Give us votes and offices,” and Congress proceeds to create a commission Thus responsibilities are shi+rked and places are , since many do, that the life of nations is rowth and decline assi--has not our world reached the top of the acclivity, and pausing for a moment may it not be about to take the doard course into another abyss of collapse and oblivion?
The miracles of electricity the last word of science, what is left for raphy, the airplane and the auto from the material to the ethical it seems of the very nature of the huanization of societies forto certain fantastic i in theFrenchions and only one soup!” Since then both the soups and the religions have multiplied until there is scarce a culinary or moral conception which has not some sect or club to represent it The uplift is the keynote of these
Chapter the Third
The Inauguration of Lincoln--I Quit Washi+ngton and Return to Tennessee--A Run-a-bout with Forest--Through the Federal Lines and a Dangerous Adventure--Good Luck at Memphis
I
It may have been Louis the Fifteenth, or it may have been Madae;” but whichever it was, very ht was in Mr Buchanan's mind in 1861 as the time for his exit from the White House approached At the North there had been a political ground-swell; at the South, secession, half accomplished by the Gulf States, yawned in the Border States Curiously enough, very few believed that as imminent
As a reporter for the States I ton He came in unexpectedly ahead of the hour announced, to escape, as was given out, a well-laid plan to assassinate hih Baltimore I did not believe at the tiround for this apprehension