"Mikes" and
"Jakes" who make their bread and butter out of the spoils and
peculations of office. A Clay or Webster, a Seward or Sumner,
sometimes gets into politics, but it is by accident. There is not
enough money in our politics to cause honest men to make it an object,
while the corruption frequently necessary to maintain a political
position, is so disgusting as to deter honest men from making it a
business.

A love of power easily degenerates from patriotism into treason or
tyranny, or both. As it is easier to fall from virtue to vice than it
is to rise from vice to virtue, so it is easier to fall from
patriotism than to rise to it.

Before the war the men of the South engaged, at first, in politics as
an elegant pastime. They had plenty of leisure and plenty of money.
They did not take to literature and science, because these pursuits
require severe work and more or less of a strong bias, for a thorough
exposition of their profound penetralia. It may be, too, that their
assumed patrician sensitiveness shrank from entering into competition
with the plebeian fellows who had to study hard and write voluminously
for a few pennies to keep soul and body together. And your Southern
grandees, before the war, were not compelled to drudge for a
subsistence; they had to take little thought for the morrow. Their
vast landed estates and black slaves were things that did not
fluctuate; under the effective supervision of the viperous
slave-driver the black Samson rose before the coming of the sun, and
the land, nature's own flower garden and man's inalienable heritage,
brought forth golden corn and snowy cotton in their season. Southern
intelligence expended its odors in the avenues where brilliance, not
profundity, was the passport to popularity. Hence, Southern
hospitality (giving to others that which had been deliberately stolen)
became almost as proverbial in the _polite_ circles of America and
Europe as the long established suavity and condescension of the
French. And even unto the present time the hospitality of the South,
shorn of its profuseness and grandiloquence, is frequently the theme
of newspaper hacks and magazine penny-a-liners. But the shadow alone
remains; the substance has departed--"There are no birds in last
year's nest."

If the literary reputation of the United States had been rated, up to
the close of the Rebellion, on the contributions of Southern
men--fiction, prose and poetry, science, art, and inv