The campaigns increase in intensity week after week and expire, or explode, in a blaze of glory the night before election, at which time the committees of the leading parties set forth the reasons that make each side certain of success.  On election day a hush spreads over the land and the voters wend their way to the polling places, where each voter is permitted to register a sovereign’s will.  Usually by midnight the wires flash out the name of one who is to be added to the list of Presidents.  We give him a few weeks to rest and get ready and then, on a certain day in March and at a certain hour, he goes to the White House door and knocks.  The occupant opens the door, and with a wearied look upon his face, and yet a smile, says, “I was expecting you just at this moment.”  Then the man on the inside of the White House goes out and becomes a private citizen again, while the man on the outside goes in, takes the oath of office and is clothed with authority such as no other human being, but a President, ever exercised.

He writes an order and ships go out to sea with their big-mouthed guns; he writes another order and the ships return.  At his command armies assemble and march and fight, and men die; at his word armies dissolve and soldiers become citizens again.  This goes on for just so many years and months and weeks and days—­for just so many hours and minutes and seconds, and then there is another knock on the White House door and another man comes with a new commission from the people.

Is it not a great thing to live in a land like this where the people can, at the polls, select one of their number and lift him to this pinnacle of power?  And is it not greater still that the people are able to reduce a President to the ranks as well as to lift him up?  When they elevate him he is just common clay, but when they take him down from his high place they separate him from those instrumentalities of government which despots have employed for the enslavement of their people.

And why is it that we live under a government resting upon the consent of the governed, and in a land in which the people rule?  Because throughout the centuries millions of the best and the bravest have given their lives that we might be free.  Every right of which we boast is a blood-bought right, and bought by the blood of others, not our own.  Would you not think that people who inherit such a government as this would be grateful for the priceless gift and live up to every obligation of citizenship?  It would seem so, and yet those acquainted with politics know that the difficult task is to get the vote out.  Even in a hotly contested presidential election we never get the full vote out.  If ninety per cent of the vote is polled we are happy; if eighty-five per cent, is polled we are satisfied.  If it is an intermediate election the vote may be less than eighty per cent., or even seventy-five.  In a primary, which is often more important than an election, the vote sometimes falls below fifty, or even forty per cent.