In Tamtonia there is a current popular saying dating from many centuries back and running this way:  “Eht eciffo dluohs kees eht nam, ton eht nam eht eciffo”—­which may be translated thus:  “No citizen ought to try to secure power for himself, but should be selected by others for his fitness to exercise it.”  The sentiment which this wise and decent phrase expresses has long ceased to have a place in the hearts of those who are everlastingly repeating it, but with regard to the office of Tnediserp it has still a remnant of the vitality of habit.  This, however, is fast dying out, and a few years ago one of the congenital idiots who was a candidate for the highest dignity boldly broke the inhibition and made speeches to the people in advocacy of himself, all over the country.  Even more recently another has uttered his preferences in much the same way, but with this difference:  he did his speechmaking at his own home, the ax-grinders in his interest rounding up audiences for him and herding them before his door.  One of the two corpses, too, was galvanized into a kind of ghastly activity and became a talking automaton; but the other had been too long dead.  In a few years more the decent tradition that a man should not blow his own horn will be obsolete in its application to the high office, as it is to all the others, but the popular saying will lose none of its currency for that.

To the American mind nothing can be more shocking than the Tamtonian practice of openly soliciting political preferment and even paying money to assist in securing it.  With us such immodesty would be taken as proof of the offender’s unfitness to exercise the power which he asks for, or bear the dignity which, in soliciting it, he belittles.  Yet no Tamtonian ever refused to take the hand of a man guilty of such conduct, and there have been instances of fathers giving these greedy vulgarians the hands of their daughters in marriage and thereby assisting to perpetuate the species.  The kind of government given by men who go about begging for the right to govern can be more easily imagined than endured.  In short, I cannot help thinking that when, unable longer to bear with patience the evils entailed by the vices and follies of its inhabitants, I sailed away from the accursed island of Tamtonia, I left behind me the most pestilent race of rascals and ignoramuses to be found anywhere in the universe; and I never can sufficiently thank the divine Power who spared me the disadvantage and shame of being one of them, and cast my lot in this favored land of goodness and right reason, the blessed abode of public morality and private worth—­of liberty, conscience and common sense.

I was not, however, to reach it without further detention in barbarous countries.  After being at sea four days I was seized by my mutinous crew, set ashore upon an island, and having been made insensible by a blow upon the head was basely abandoned.

MAROONED ON UG