ttle they guessed the length and strength
and vitality of the roots left in the soil of the centuries when their
noxious harvestage of mischievous institutions had been cast as rubbish
to the void!

I am no contestant for forms of government--no believer in either the
practical value or the permanence of any that has yet been devised. That
all men are created equal, in the best and highest sense of the phrase,
I hold; not as I observe it held by others, but as a living faith. That
an officeholder is a servant of the people; that I am his political
superior, owing him no deference, and entitled to such deference
from him as may be serviceable to keep him in mind of his
subordination--these are propositions which command my assent, which
I _feel_ to be true and which determine the character of my personal
relations with those whom they concern. That I should give my hand, or
bend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in homage to or recognition
of his office, great or small, is to me simply inconceivable. These
tricks of servility with the softened names are the vestiges of an
involuntary allegiance to power extraneous to the performer. They
represent in our American life obedience and propitiation in their most
primitive and odious forms. The man who speaks of them as manifestations
of a proper respect for "the President's great office" is either a
rogue, a dupe or a journalist They come to us out of a fascinating but
terrible past as survivals of servitude. They speak a various language
of oppression, and the superstition of man-worship; they cany forward
the traditions of the sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of the
people may be heard always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave.

Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Respect the dead. Let the
President look to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His going
about the country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guest
of a thieving corporation, but at our expense--shining and dining and
swining--unsouling himself of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudes
calculated for the meridian of Coon Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniously
adapted to each water tank on the line of his absurd "progress," does
not prove it, and the presumption of his "great office" is against him.

Can you not see, poor misguided "fellow citizens," how you permit your
political taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and load you
down with them? Will nothing te