is enforced. Leaders spring up to take command of the political organizations, the modern condottieri, always agents of crime and despotism. They fight campaigns as they would fight battles; and they fight them with no more principle than the lawless bands that plundered Italy and Spain at the close of the middle ages.[1] If divided counsels are fatal in war, they are equally fatal in politics. Nothing, therefore, becomes more odious than independence in thought and action; and nothing is more sternly rebuked, and, if possible, severely punished.[2] Only the utmost fidelity is approved, and rewarded with either appointments, or contracts, or legislative favors. The policy adopted is, not what is right, but what is expedient. The demoralizing principles of Jesuitism assume control, and the end, which is party triumph, is made to justify its achievement by any means. Hence, caucus tricks and crimes, convention intrigue and outrage, bribery and fraud at elections, and sophistry and falsehood in political discussion. Hence, the exclusion from public life of men that loathe these practices and refuse to sell their souls to the Mephistopheles of politics. Hence the dominance of men, including even the "scholar in politics," so quickly debased, that never hesitate to purchase power by the creation of offices or by the plunder of the rich. Hence the low tone, the scenes of violence, and the marked decadence of all legislative bodies in every part of the world.
No fine phrases of social or political speculation can mask the odium of the fact that the spirit of democracy, like that of other
- ↑ The parallel is quite perfect. It will be remembered that the Italian freebooters on both sides used to have "rings"—that is, understandings by which they profited as much as possible from their warfare and at the same time did each other as little damage as possible. See Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, vol. ii, p. 279. In Spain, as in the United States, it was found necessary for good citizens to band themselves together to secure protection from those that should have protected them. The Hermandad, or Holy Brotherhood, was the analogue of our Good Government Clubs, Citizens' Unions, etc. (Ferdinand and Isabella, vol. i, pp. 26, 186.) By the way, there could be no more convincing evidence of the capacity of people to look after themselves without the aid of the state—that is, the politicians—than the existence of such organizations as these clubs and unions throughout the country to look after the politicians. Is it not absurd to suppose people that have to form voluntary organizations to watch their government and to prevent it from driving them into bankruptcy by its incompetency and dishonesty are unfitted to form voluntary organizations to undertake enterprises that social reformers have come to imagine government alone fitted to undertake?
- ↑ A striking example of this kind of intolerance is to be found in Senator Piatt's letter of May 8, 1897, on the Citizens' Union of New York. "It can't prance around," he said, "with the agile irresponsibility of a self-constituted committee of 'best citizens.' It can agree to no basis of union which substitutes the government of an individual acting wholly on his own whims and caprices for the rule of an organized responsible party performing an authorized party policy." Rather than have good government independent of any particular party organization. Senator Piatt, echoing the sentiment of his lieutenant, Mr. Lauterbach, would see the triumph of its enemies.
