better politician than nine tenths of the best
read European political philosophers--works under all this tumult and
confusion of tongues. The newspapers and politicians fret and fume and
shout and denounce; but the great mass, the nineteen or twenty millions,
work away in the fields and workshops, saying little, thinking much,
hardy, earnest, self-reliant, very tolerant, very indulgent, very
shrewd, but ready whenever the government needs it, with musket, or
purse, or vote, as the case may be, laughing and cheering occasionally
at public meetings, but when you meet them individually on the highroad
or in their own houses, very cool, then, sensible men, filled with no
delusions, carried away by no frenzies, believing firmly in the future
greatness and glory of the republic, but holding to no other article of
faith as essential to political salvation."

Before continuing the quotation I wish to call attention to the fact
that Godkin's illustration was more effective in 1868 than now: then
there was a solemn and vital meaning to the prayers offered up for
persons going to sea that they might be preserved from the dangers of
the deep. "Every now and then," he went on to say, "as one watches the
political storms in the United States, one is reminded of one's feelings
as one lies in bed on a stormy night in an ocean steamer in a head wind.
Each blow of the sea shakes the ship from stem to stern, and every now
and then a tremendous one seems to paralyze her. The machinery seems to
stop work; there is a dead pause, and you think for a moment the end has
come; but the throbbing begins once more, and if you go up on deck and
look down in the hold, you see the firemen and engineers at their posts,
apparently unconscious of anything but their work, and as sure of
getting into port as if there was not a ripple on the water."

This letter of Godkin's was written on January 8, 1868, when Congress
was engaged in the reconstruction of the South on the basis of negro
suffrage, when the quarrel between Congress and President Johnson was
acute and his impeachment not two months off. At about this time Godkin
set down Evarts's opinion that "we are witnessing the decline of public
morality which usually presages revolution," and reported that Howells
was talking "despondently like everybody else about the condition of
morals and manners."[205] Of like tenor was the opinion of an
arch-conservative, George Ticknor, written in 1869, which bea