Scripture of all nations. The drunkards and villains in the highest gallery in a cheap theater, men who are going to live tomorrow by thieving, in profligacy, will all the same applaud the sentiments of virtue which they hear upon the stage. Strangely enough they want other people to be good though they do not care to be good themselves. The angel who presides over such tests of the most obnoxious people does his very best to secure the triumphs of universal suffrage.
The celebrated epigram of President Lincoln, that you can fool all the people part of the time and a part of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time, is one of the axioms of government upon which rests the successes of universal suffrage.
Lincoln said in his first Message, "There are many single regiments (in the army) whose members, one and another possess full practical knowledge of all the arts, sciences, professions, and whatever else, whether useful or elegant, is known in the world; and there is scarcely one from which there could not be selected a President, a Cabinet, a Congress, and perhaps a Court, competent to administer the government itself. Nor do I say this is not true also in the army of our late friends, now adversaries in this contest."
The statement was received by the Middle Ages and the men who represent them as absurd—as a piece of American bluster. It was absolutely true and those of us who lived through 1861 know that it was true. Take the matter of money. A New York regiment on the Potomac had not been paid for two or three months. A private called on the colonel, touched his hat and offered his personal check that the men might be paid, saying that he could well wait till the convenience of the Government should refund the money to him. Such stories are not often told today, simply because there were so many of them to tell.
In the classification of men today, the dainty Feudal critics are in the habit of speaking of the masses, as they call them, as if they were people who know nothing and follow like a Roman rabble on
