ing on; and
there is always the confident hope of success in the next canvass. That
one's cause will succeed because it ought to succeed is perhaps the most
general and invincible folly affecting the human judgment Observation
can not shake it, nor experience destroy. Though you bray a partisan in
the mortar of adversity till he numbers the strokes of the pestle by the
hairs of his head, yet will not this fool notion depart from him. He is
always going to win the next time, however frequently and disastrously
he has lost before. And he can always give you the most cogent reasons
for the faith that is in him. His chief reliance is on the "fatal
mistakes" made since the last election by the other party. There never
was a year in which the party in power and the party out of power did
not make bad mistakes--mistakes which, unlike eggs and fish, seem always
worst when freshest. If idiotic errors of policy were always fatal, no
party would ever win an election and there would be a hope of better
government under the benign sway of the domestic cow.

VI.

Each political party accuses the "opposing candidate" of refusing to
answer certain questions which somebody has chosen to ask him. I think
myself it is discreditable for a candidate to answer any questions at
all, to make speeches, declare his policy, or to do anything whatever
to get himself elected. If a political party choose to nominate a man so
obscure that his character and his views on all public questions are
not known or inferable he ought to have the dignity to refuse to expound
them. As to the strife for office being a pursuit worthy of a noble
ambition, I do not think so; nor shall I believe that many do think so
until the term "office seeker" carries a less opprobrious meaning
and the dictum that "the office should seek the man, not the man the
office," has a narrower currency among all manner of persons. That by
acts and words generally felt to be discreditable a man may evoke great
popular enthusiasm is not at all surprising. The late Mr. Barnum was not
the first nor the last to observe that the people love to be humbugged.
They love an impostor and a scamp, and the best service that you can do
for a candidate for high political preferment is to prove him a little
better than a thief, but not quite so good as a thug.

VII.

The view is often taken that a representative is the same thing as a
delegate; that he is to have, and can honestly enter