“Out of their poverty, out of their trouble and loneliness, this man and woman have found each other, and thus have found the most beautiful and precious thing in life—love!”
OLD-TIME POLITICS
“What is the matter with this political campaign?”
An old man who can remember public events far back of the Civil War and beyond asked that question the other day. He said this campaign reminded him more of a Sunday school convention. Nobody was fighting, and very few such epithets as “liar” or “thief” or “rascal” were being used. In these days no one seems to care who is to be elected. We are all too busy trying to pay our bills. The old man bewailed the loss of power and interest in this generation. He thought this quiet indifference meant that as a nation we have lost our political vigor. Having been through some of those old-time battles, I cannot fully agree with him. It is true that few people seem interested, yet they will vote this year, and I think the quiet and thoughtful study most of them are making will prove as effective as the big noise and excitement we used to have. We are merely doing things differently now. Whether the great excitement of those old political days made us better citizens is a question which has long puzzled me. I know that in those nervous and high-strung days we did many foolish things as a part of “politics.” On the other hand, I wish sometimes that our people could get as thoroughly worked up over the tribute we are paying to the profiteers as we did in those old days over the tariff and the slavery issue.
I can well remember taking part in the campaign between Garfield and Hancock. The Democrats felt that they had been robbed of the Presidency in ’76, but as they failed to renominate Tilden the Republicans called them quitters. I had dropped out of college for awhile to work as hired man for a farmer in a Western State, and we certainly had a great time. This farmer was an old soldier; he was a good talker and thought well of his own exploits. When you found that combination 40 years ago you struck a red-hot partisan. The man’s wife was a Democrat, because her father had been. She was one of those small, black-eyed women who acquire the habit of dominating things in the schoolroom and then concentrate the habit when they take a school of one pupil in the home. Her brother lived on the next farm. He had turned Republican because he wanted to be elected county clerk. It was fully worth the price of admission to sit by the fire some stormy night and hear this woman put those two Republicans on the broiler of her tongue. They were big men, fully capable of holding their own in any ordinary argument, but this small woman cowed them as she formerly did her A B C pupils. It was enough to make any young man very thoughtful about marrying a successful teacher to see this small woman point a finger at her big husband and say:
“Now John Crandall, don’t you dare to say it isn’t the truth!”
And John didn’t dare, though from his political religion it might be a base fabrication. One day, after a particularly hard thrust, John and I were digging potatoes, and he unburdened his mind a little: