I have no faith in parties.  In monarchical and imperial governments they are always manipulated by royal boobies, who are in turn manipulated by their empty-pated favorites and their women of soporific virtue; while in republics they are always manipulated by demagogues, tricksters, and corruptionists, who figure in the newspapers as “bosses,” “heelers” and “sluggers,” and in history as statesmen, senators and representatives.  These gentlemen, who rule our government and ruin our people, comprise what Mr. Matthew Arnold recently termed the “remnant” which should be permitted to run things to suit themselves, the people, the great mass, being incapable of taking care of themselves and the complex machinery of government.  Of course, Mr. Arnold, who is necessarily very British in his ideas of government, intended that the “remnant” he had in his “mind’s eye,” should comprise men of the most exalted character and intelligence, the very things which keep them out of the gutters of politics.  Men of exalted character are expected in our country to attend to their own concerns, not the concerns of the people, and to give the “boys” a chance; while the men of exalted intelligence are, by reason of the great industry and seclusiveness necessary to their work, too much wedded to their books and their quiet modes of life to rush into ward meetings and contend for political preferment with the “Mikes” and “Jakes” who make their bread and butter out of the spoils and peculations of office.  A Clay or Webster, a Seward or Sumner, sometimes gets into politics, but it is by accident.  There is not enough money in our politics to cause honest men to make it an object, while the corruption frequently necessary to maintain a political position, is so disgusting as to deter honest men from making it a business.

A love of power easily degenerates from patriotism into treason or tyranny, or both.  As it is easier to fall from virtue to vice than it is to rise from vice to virtue, so it is easier to fall from patriotism than to rise to it.

Before the war the men of the South engaged, at first, in politics as an elegant pastime.  They had plenty of leisure and plenty of money.  They did not take to literature and science, because these pursuits require severe work and more or less of a strong bias, for a thorough exposition of their profound penetralia.  It may be, too, that their assumed patrician sensitiveness shrank from entering into competition with the plebeian fellows who had to study hard and write voluminously for a few pennies to keep soul and body together.  And your Southern grandees, before the war, were not compelled to drudge for a subsistence; they had to take little thought for the morrow.  Their vast landed estates and black slaves were things that did not fluctuate; under the effective supervision of the viperous slave-driver the black Samson rose before the coming of the sun, and the land, nature’s own flower garden and man’s inalienable heritage,