the bare fact that one party is the more
numerous puts it in power if it will only come up and be counted; to
insure which a certain time is spent by each party in reviling and
belittling the candidates of its opponents and lauding its own; and
this is the canvass, at the likening of which to a campaign every honest
soldier might reasonably take offense."

But, after all, White was only "one o' them dam litery fellers," and I
dare say the original proponent of the military metaphor, away off
there in "the dark backward and abysm of time," knew a lot more about
practical politics than White ever did. And it is practical politics to
be an ass.

In withdrawing his own name from before a convention, a California
politician once made a purely military speech of which a single sample
passage is all that I shall allow myself the happiness to quote:

"I come before you today as a Republican of the Republican banner county
of this great State of ours. From snowy Shasta on the north to sunny
Diego on the south; from the west, where the waves of the Pacific look
upon our shores, to where the barriers of the great Sierras stand clad
in eternal snow, there is no more loyal county to the Republican party
in this State than the county from which I hail. [Applause, naturally.]
Its loyalty to the party has been tested on many fields of battle
[Anglice, in many elections] and it has never wavered in the contest
Wherever the fate of battle was trembling in the balance [Homer, and
since Homer, Tom, Dick and Harry] Alameda county stepped into the breach
and rescued the Republican party from defeat."

Translated into English this military mouthing would read somewhat like
this:

"I live in Alameda county, where the Republicans have uniformly outvoted
the Democrats."

The orators at the Democratic convention a week earlier were no better
and no different. Their rhetorical stock-in-trade was the same old
shop-worn figures of speech in which their predecessors have dealt for
ages, and in which their successors will traffic to the end of--well, to
the end of that imitative quality in the national character, which,
by its superior intensity, serves to distinguish us from the apes that
perish.

III.

"What we most need, to secure honest elections," says a well-meaning
reformer, "is the Clifford or the Myers voting machine." Why, truly,
here is a hopeful spirit--a rare and radiant intelligence suffused with
the conviction that men