lf
a dozen accidentally-chosen men interpreted their prejudices or
preferences as being that Reform. Administration after administration
and Party after Party had persisted in their desperate attempts to fit
the youthful colonial garments, made by our Fathers after a by-gone
fashion, over the expanded limits and generous outline of a matured
nation. There were patches here and there; there were grievous rents
and holes here and there; there were ludicrous and painful exposures of
growing limbs everywhere; and the Party in Power and the Party out of
Power could do nothing but mend and patch, and revamp and cleanse and
scour, and occasionally, in the wildness of despair, suggest even the
cutting off the rebellious limbs that persisted in growing beyond the
swaddling clothes of its infancy.

It was a capital of Contradictions and Inconsistencies. At one end of
the Avenue sat the responsible High Keeper of the military honor, valor,
and war-like prestige of a great nation, without the power to pay his
own troops their legal dues until some selfish quarrel between Party
and Party was settled. Hard by sat another Secretary, whose established
functions seemed to be the misrepresentation of the nation abroad by
the least characteristic of its classes, the politicians,--and only then
when they had been defeated as politicians, and when their constituents
had declared them no longer worthy to be even THEIR representatives.
This National Absurdity was only equaled by another, wherein an
ex-Politician was for four years expected to uphold the honor of a flag
of a great nation over an ocean he had never tempted, with a discipline
the rudiments of which he could scarcely acquire before he was removed,
or his term of office expired, receiving his orders from a superior
officer as ignorant of his special duties as himself, and subjected to
the revision of a Congress cognizant of him only as a politician. At the
farther end of the Avenue was another department so vast in its extent
and so varied in its functions that few of the really great practical
workers of the land would have accepted its responsibility for ten times
its salary, but which the most perfect constitution in the world handed
over to men who were obliged to make it a stepping stone to future
preferment. There was another department, more suggestive of its
financial functions from the occasional extravagances or economies
exhibited in its payrolls,--successive Congresses