Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/512

 498 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. 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. 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