ng man is sure
to get there; but, as an emblem, I believe it illustrates the noblest
privileges, and the proudest supremacy, on the face of the globe. And I
refer to it as a _possibility_ for the poorest and humblest child in the
land. No hereditary gallery leads to it--only the broad road of the
people. And, as the highest seat in the nation, it illustrates all the
honors of the nation. They are possible to anybody. And I trust the time
has not yet arrived when this can be said only by way of satire; can be
true only because the waves of political corruption carry the meanest
and unworthiest into office; but as a grand fact, a fact with which are
involved the springs of our national greatness and power, it may be said
that here there are no barriers of caste, no terms of descent, no depths
so low that enterprise cannot rise out of them, no heights so exalted
that genius cannot attain them; for, on a platform as level to the
peasant's threshold as to the nabob's door, stand the judge's bench, the
senator's seat, and the President's chair.

As another symbol of this political equality, I would name the
_Ballot-Box_. I am aware that this is not everywhere a consistent
symbol; but to a large degree it is so. I know what miserable
associations cluster around this instrument of popular power. I know
that the arena in which it stands is trodden into mire by the feet of
reckless ambition and selfish greed. The wire-pulling and the bribing,
the pitiful truckling and the grotesque compromises, the exaggeration
and the detraction, the melo-dramatic issues and the sham patriotism,
the party watch-words and the party nick-names, the schemes of the few
paraded as the will of the many, the elevation of men whose only worth
is in the votes they command--vile men, whose hands you would not grasp
in friendship, whose presence you would not tolerate by your
fireside--incompetent men, whose fitness is not in their capacity as
functionaries, or legislators, but as organ pipes; the snatching at the
slices and offal of office, the intemperance and the violence, the
finesse and the falsehood, the gin and the glory; these are indeed but
too closely identified with that political agitation which circles
around the Ballot-Box. But, after all, they are not essential to it.
They are only the masks of a genuine grandeur and importance. For it
_is_ a grand thing--something which involves profound doctrines of
Right--something which has cost ages of