bursts of passion and prejudice, and are accompanied by such torrents of vulgar calumny, falsehood, and abuse, that they are anything but creditable to our self-respect and tastes. They not only let loose every viler form of uncharitableness and evil-speaking, but they are permitted to absorb the energies of society to such an extent that even commercial activity is arrested, and the best moral and social developments are paralyzed for the time. In these quadrennial saturnalia the participants, for the most part, take leave of their senses, and comport themselves like bedlamites or Mænads." In the national campaign preceding the last, one of the candidates, as we all remember, was constrained to say, "I hardly know whether I am running for the Presidency or the penitentiary." In the last campaign a Presidential candidate received the suffrages of a majority of the people of the United States, but he failed to get the office, and has ever since been hunted with libels and blackened with calumny, until multitudes regard him as a consummate knave, fit only for the State-prison.
In these vile practices of falsehood and detraction the whole country is implicated, for we are a nation of politicians. Politics is not only the dominant subject of thought, but its method is the dominant method of thinking. We have hundreds of colleges and thousands of common schools, multitudinous newspapers and countless pulpits, and all, as we say, for the promotion of public intelligence and the elevation of public morality; but, when election comes, professors, teachers, editors, and clergymen, all join in "saving their country" by the means which Dr. Channing has so fittingly characterized. Whoever is in the pulpit, the pews are filled with politicians; whoever is editor, the subscribers are politicians; all the instructors in our public schools are political stipendiaries, and politicians dictate the studies. Indeed, the reason given for the very existence of these schools is political. As for the colleges, they are more than anything else workshops for the manufacture of politicians; as was sufficiently attested by President Hayes, the other day, when he told them at Yale that the great office-holders are mere figure-heads shaped by the institutions where officeholders are made.
So rooted and so fortified is this political system which perpetually preys upon truth and justice, corrupts the morals of the nation, and flames out in Kearneyism and kindred scandals of a reckless partisanship which disgrace every State in the Union. But, powerfully intrenched as it is, we believe that this system is destined to be ultimately improved if not renovated. But it will be slow work, and the reform will not proceed from within. Politicians engendered by the system will not transform it. The amending and elevating influences must come from without. Men must be thoroughly freed from the system before they can deal with it efficiently. The first thing needed by the American citizen is to gain an independent position for the critical study of the institutions of his country; and this can only be done by vigorous individual revolt against party domination. The powerful spell of partisan influence must be broken before men can be qualified to pursue the study of politics by the scientific method, for under the bias of party feeling nothing is seen aright. Personal independence of action in political matters, freedom from the trammels of partisanship, is the true preparation for the intelligent investigation of political questions. Multitudes of our best people are already thoroughly disgusted with politics. Thousands will not go to the polls except under pressure of violent campaign excitement. Politicians denounce this as unpatriotic; but there can be no duty to one's country so imperative as rebellion against party
