ween a lifelong democrat
and any other kind of lifelong slave? Is it less humiliating to dance to
the lash of one master than another?

This infamous doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the
hands of politicians of the baser sort--and doubtless for that it was
borrowed--or stolen--from the monarchial system. It enables them to
foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote
for if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his
first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name.

Shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party?
Shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his
conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides? Oh no,
you say; it does not demand that. But what if it produce that in spite
of you? There is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought
not to do when drunk, but most men will do them just the same; and so we
hear no arguments about obligations in the matter--we only hear men
warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can
betray men into such things.

This is a funny business all around. The same men who enthusiastically
preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and willing
and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to desert his
church or a fellow-American to desert his party. The man who deserts to
them is all that is high and pure and beautiful--apparently; the man who
deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. This is
Consistency--with a capital C.

With the daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist
scoffs at the Independent--or as he calls him, with cutting irony, the
Mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world
about him. But--the Mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history
at his back; stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty
ancestry. He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no
single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls
and bodies, the hearts and the brains of the children of this world, but
a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory: And their names
are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther,
Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a
human soul in this world-end never will.

APPENDIX S

ORIGINAL PREFACE FOR