not a party, is
not a great body of citizens; we have to fight only little coteries,
groups of men here and there, a few men, who subsist by deceiving us and
cannot subsist a moment after they cease to deceive us.

I had occasion to test the power of such a group in the State of New
Jersey, and I had the satisfaction of discovering that I had been right in
supposing that they did not possess any power at all. It looked as if they
were entrenched in a fortress; it looked as if the embrasures of the
fortress showed the muzzles of guns; but, as I told my good
fellow-citizens, all they had to do was to press a little upon it and they
would find that the fortress was a mere cardboard fabric; that it was a
piece of stage property; that just so soon as the audience got ready to
look behind the scenes they would learn that the army which had been
marching and counter-marching in such terrifying array consisted of a
single company that had gone in one wing and around and out at the other
wing, and could have thus marched in procession for twenty-four hours. You
only need about twenty-four men to do the trick. These men are impostors.
They are powerful only in proportion as we are susceptible to absurd fear
of them. Their capital is our ignorance and our credulity.

To-day we are seeing something that some of us have waited all of our
lives to see. We are witnessing a rising of the country. We are seeing a
whole people stand up and decline any longer to be imposed upon. The day
has come when men are saying to each other: "It doesn't make a
peppercorn's difference to me what party I have voted with. I am going to
pick out the men I want and the policies I want, and let the label take
care of itself. I do not find any great difference between my table of
contents and the table of contents of those who have voted with the other
party, and who, like me, are very much dissatisfied with the way in which
their party has rewarded their faithfulness. They want the same things
that I want, and I don't know of anything under God's heaven to prevent
our getting together. We want the same things, we have the same faith in
the old traditions of the American people, and we have made up our minds
that we are going to have now at last the reality instead of the shadow."

We Americans have been too long satisfied with merely going through the
motions of government. We have been having a mock game. We have been going
to the polls and saying: "This