interest; every man was
thinking of his own interest and striving only to locate the butter on
his political bread.

There was a third class, made up of those who were neither goldbugs nor
silverbugs; they were straddlebugs, and, like the two sides of the
shield, would be gold when looked at by one contingent and silver when
viewed by the other. Senator Hanway, whose monk's face seemed to mark
him as private secretary of the Genius of Patriotism, was an eminent
straddlebug. He was thinking on those delegations that would make up the
convention and choose a candidate for the Presidency. The prudent
Senator Hanway would be in line with all opinions, and occupied both
sides of the money question without becoming the open champion of
either.

Not alone did Richard, gazing from the galleries, lose faith in the
patriotism of House and Senate men, but he began to doubt the verity of
their partisanship. Considering what they did, rather than what they
said, he discovered that the true difference between the two great
political parties was the difference between cat owls and horned owls,
and lay mainly in the noises they made. When it came to deeds, both
killed chickens, and both appeared equally ready to pillage the hen
roosts of government. As for government--that is to say, the thing
controlling and not the thing controlled: it was made up of the
President, the Speaker, and a dozen more in Cabinet and Congress; and
that was government.

The picture nourished Richard's failing of cynicism, and served to dull
that edge of native patriotism which it was assumed he owned when first
he came. He got an impression of government that left him nothing to
fight and bleed and die for should the thick mutter of the war-drums
call folk to the field. Good politics, as the term is practiced, means
bad patriotism, and Washington was a nest of politics and nothing else
besides. It made decisively a situation, so Richard was driven to
conclude, wherein that man should be the best patriot who knew least of
his own government; he should fight harder and suffer more cheerfully
and die more blithely in its defense in exact proportion to his
ignorance of whom and what he was fighting and suffering and dying for.
It was a sullen conclusion surely; but, forced home upon Richard, it
taught him a vitriolic harshness that, getting into his letters to
flavor all he wrote, gave him national vogue, and added to that mixture
of hatred and admiration wit