ays breed contempt, but
it is a veritable eye opener. To me no divinity hedged the brow of
a senator. I knew the White House too well to be impressed by its
architectural grandeur without and rather bizarre furnishments within.

VII

I have declaimed not a little in my time about the ignoble trade of
politics, the collective dishonesty of parties and the vulgarities of
the self-exploiting professional office hunters. Parties are parties.
Professional politics and politicians are probably neither worse nor
better--barring their pretensions--than other lines of human endeavor.
The play actor must be agreeable on the stage of the playhouse; the
politician on the highways and the hustings, which constitute his
playhouse--all the world a stage--neither to be seriously blamed for
the dissimulation which, being an asset, becomes, as it were, a second
nature.

The men who between 1850 and 1861 might have saved the Union and averted
the War of Sections were on either side professional politicians,
with here and there an unselfish, far-seeing, patriotic man, whose
admonitions were not heeded by the people ranging on opposing sides of
party lines. The two most potential of the party leaders were Mr. Davis
and Mr. Seward. The South might have seen and known that the one hope of
the institution of slavery lay in the Union. However it ended, disunion
led to abolition. The world--the whole trend of modern thought--was
set against slavery. But politics, based on party feeling, is a game of
blindman's buff. And then--here I show myself a son of Scotland--there
is a destiny. "What is to be," says the predestinarian Mother Goose,
"will be, though it never come to pass."

That was surely the logic of the irrepressible conflict--only it
did come to pass--and for four years millions of people, the most
homogeneous, practical and intelligent, fought to a finish a fight over
a quiddity; both devoted to liberty, order and law, neither seeking any
real change in the character of its organic contract.

Human nature remains ever the same. These days are very like those days.
We have had fifty years of a restored Union. The sectional fires have
quite gone out. Yet behold the schemes of revolution claiming the
regenerative. Most of them call themselves the "uplift!"

Let us agree at once that all government is more or less a failure;
society as fraudulent as the satirists describe it; yet, when we turn
to the uplift--particularly the pr