for no stated term.  He has in no sense become a part of an army; he is in no way restrained of his freedom.  Yet he will presently find that his bosses and his newspapers have assumed just the reverse of that:  that they have blandly arrogated to themselves an ironclad military authority over him; and within twelve months, if he is an average man, he will have surrendered his liberty, and will actually be silly enough to believe that he cannot leave that party, for any cause whatever, without being a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately dishonored man.

There you have the just measure of that freedom of conscience, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech and action which we hear so much inflated foolishness about as being the precious possession of the republic.  Whereas, in truth, the surest way for a man to make of himself a target for almost universal scorn, obloquy, slander, and insult is to stop twaddling about these priceless independencies and attempt to exercise one of them.  If he is a preacher half his congregation will clamor for his expulsion—­and will expel him, except they find it will injure real estate in the neighborhood; if he is a doctor his own dead will turn against him.

I repeat that the new party-member who supposed himself independent will presently find that the party have somehow got a mortgage on his soul, and that within a year he will recognize the mortgage, deliver up his liberty, and actually believe he cannot retire from that party from any motive howsoever high and right in his own eyes without shame and dishonor.

Is it possible for human wickedness to invent a doctrine more infernal and poisonous than this?  Is there imaginable a baser servitude than it imposes?  What slave is so degraded as the slave that is proud that he is a slave?  What is the essential difference between a lifelong democrat and any other kind of lifelong slave?  Is it less humiliating to dance to the lash of one master than another?

This infamous doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the hands of politicians of the baser sort—­and doubtless for that it was borrowed—­or stolen—­from the monarchial system.  It enables them to foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote for if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name.

Shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party?  Shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides?  Oh no, you say; it does not demand that.  But what if it produce that in spite of you?  There is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought not to do when drunk, but most men will do them just the same; and so we hear no arguments about obligations in the matter—­we only hear men warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can betray men into such things.