DANIEL WEBSTER
You will search the pages of history in vain without finding a parallel to present conditions.
The war gave Bohemia her freedom; at the same time it licensed a bohemian poet to keep Italy stewing in her own juice, a bohemian journalist from New York to direct affairs in Moscow, and a bohemian socialist from Switzerland to rule over Russia.
Added to this a fashionable ladies’ pianist has tried his hand, or should I say fingers, in the science of unfurling the sails of Poland’s new Ship of State, while shop-keepers direct affairs in Germany and pusilanimous politicians keep the people of America in a state of tepid trepidation and flatulent turmoil. Can you wonder that the country is being hypnotized by the sight of so many cantankerous cataleptics?
Macbeth declared he had waded in so far that returning would be as perilous as going on. Nothing will move them until they are swamped by the high tide of reaction and flung as flotsam on the rocks of a stormy opportunism.
A new Damocles has a sword suspended over the National Capitol, and liberty hangs to the hinges of the Constitution by a hair.