The vice of universal suffrage is the infinitesimal subdivision of personal responsibility.  The guilt of every national sin comes back to the voter in a fraction the denominator of which is several millions.  It is idle to talk of the responsibility of officials to their constituencies or to the people.  The President of the United States, during his four years of office, is less amenable to public opinion than the Queen of England through her ministers; senators, with embassies in prospect, laugh at instructions; representatives think they have made a good bargain when they exchange the barren approval of constituencies for the smile of one whom a lucky death, perhaps, has converted into the Presidential Midas of the moment; and in a nation of adventurers, success is too easily allowed to sanctify a speculation by which a man sells his pitiful self for a better price than even a Jew could get for the Saviour of the world.  It cannot be too often repeated, that the only responsibility which is of saving efficacy in a Democracy is that of every individual man in it to his conscience and his God.  As long as any one of us holds the ballot in his hand, he is truly, what we sometimes vaguely boast, a sovereign,—­a constituent part of Destiny; the infinite Future is his vassal; History holds her iron stylus as his scribe; Lachesis awaits his word to close or to suspend her fatal shears;—­but the moment his vote is cast, he becomes the serf of circumstance, at the mercy of the white-livered representative’s cowardice, or the venal one’s itching palm.  Our only safety, then, is in the aggregate fidelity to personal rectitude, which may lessen the chances of representative dishonesty, or, at the worst, constitute a public opinion that shall make the whole country a penitentiary for such treason, and turn the price of public honor to fairy-money, whose withered leaves but mock the possessor with the futile memory of self-degradation.  Let every man remember, that, though he may be a nothing in himself, yet every cipher gains the power of multiplying by ten when it is placed on the right side of whatever unit for the time represents the cause of truth and justice.  What we need is a thorough awakening of the individual conscience; and if we once become aware how the still and stealthy ashes of political apathy and moral insensibility are slipping under our feet and hurrying us with them toward the crater’s irrevocable core, it may be that the effort of self-preservation called forth by the danger will make us love the daring energy and the dependence on our individual strength, that alone can keep us free and worthy to be freemen.