Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/107

 politics altogether, and to forswear them and parties, too, although I never quite understood the philosophy of the attitude until, a few years later, Golden Rule Jones made it clear. He made many things clear, for he dropped the plummet of his original mind down, down, down, more profoundly into fundamental life than anyone I can think of.

To me, in those days, the tariff question had seemed entirely fundamental. I used to think that if we could but have civil-service reform, and tariff for revenue only, the world would go very well. The tariff question is not considered fundamental in these days, of course, so fast and so far past the Mugwumps has the world run, though everybody realizes its evil, and knows, or should know, that the notion of privilege on which tariffs are founded is quite fundamentally wrong, and every political party promises to reduce its rates, or revise them, or at least to take some measures against the lie.

The Democratic party, to be sure, redeemed itself later under the splendid leadership of President Wilson, but at that time, while we recognized the evil of the theory, we seemed to have sunk into a sordid acquiescence in the fact; everybody thought the tariff wrong, but nobody wished to have it done away with so long as there was a chance, to speak in modern American, for him to get in on the graft. The word "graft" was unknown in those days, by all save those thieves in whose argot it was found and devoted to its present general use in the vocabulary. I suppose it is in the dictionary by this time. In any event, it is not strange that the word should