ancient and honorable orders) or a club
dinner--they all belong to clubs and pay dues. But it is in the
political convention that they come out particularly strong. By some
imperious tradition having the force of written law it is decreed that
in these absurd bodies of our fellow citizens no word of sense shall be
uttered from the platform; whatever is uttered in set speeches shall be
addressed to the meanest capacity present As a chain can be no stronger
than its weakest link, so nothing said by the speakers at a political
convention must be above the intellectual reach of the most pernicious
idiot having a seat and a vote. I don't know why it is so. It seems to
be thought that if he is not suitably entertained he will not attend, as
a delegate, the next convention.

Here are the opening sentences of the speech in which a man was once
nominated for Governor:

"Two years ago the Republican party in State and Nation marched to
imperial triumph. On every hilltop and mountain peak our beacons
blazed and we awakened the echoes of every valley with songs of our
rejoicings."

And so forth. Now, if I were asked to recast those sentences so that
they should conform to the simple truth and be inoffensive to good taste
I should say something like this:

"Two years ago the Republican party won a general election."

If there is any thing in this inflated rigmarole that is not adequately
expressed in my amended statement, what is it? As to eloquence it will
hardly be argued that nonsense, falsehood and metaphors which were
old when Rome was young are essential to that. The first man (in early
Greece) who spoke of awakening an echo did a felicitous thing. Was it
felicitous in the second? Is it felicitous now? As to that military
metaphor--the "marching" and so forth--its inventor was as great an ass
as any one of the incalculable multitude of his plagiarists. On this
matter hear the late Richard Grant White:

"Is it not time that we had done with the nauseous talk about campaigns,
and standard-bearers, and glorious victories (imperial triumphs) and
all the bloated army-bumming bombast which is so rife for the six months
preceding an election? To read almost any one of our political papers
during a canvass is enough to make one sick and sorry.... An election
has no manner of likeness to a campaign, or a battle. It is not even a
contest in which the stronger or more dexterous party is the winner; it
is a mere counting, in which