“Frankly, I don’t know,” was the reply.
“Maybe your next National Convention will relieve the situation,” insinuated the doctor, slyly.
“I am sure that relief will not come,” said the professor, “from existing political parties, whose orators grow earnest and belligerent over the ghosts of dead issues, and travel around and around over the same path, like an old horse on an arrastra, forever going somewhere and never getting anywhere, neither knowing or caring whether he is grinding pay rock or waste rock, conscious only of the whip of his driver, and hopeful only of his allowance of barley.”
“Why, John, I thought you were a devoted partisan,” said the doctor.
“Did you?” was the retort. “Well, you were mistaken. What can be hoped from political parties when legislators who are not free from suspicion of venality are voted for and elected year after year, because Grant captured Vicksburg, or Lincoln issued a proclamation of emancipation, or Stonewall Jackson was killed more than twenty-five years ago? Must the people forever submit to the rule of brawlers, and vote sellers, and trust betrayers, because such men hurrah for some flag which other men once carried into battle? Must the masses lie down in the path of Juggernaut and invite him to crush them, because the evil-visaged god parades his devotion to party issues which were long ago remitted to the limbo of things lost on earth?”
“The people will right all the evils of which you complain, professor, so soon as they see that it is to their interest to do so.”
“How can they doubt that it is their interest to right them? It is they who suffer both in purse and pride for every unjust exaction and every dishonest evasion. The poorest do not escape the consequences; it all comes out of their toil in the end. It depletes their pockets in a hundred unobserved ways. They pay for it in enhanced taxation of their homes, in the fuel which cooks their food, in a greater cost of the necessaries of life, in a higher rent, in the nails which hold their houses together, and in the increased cost of the blows of the hammer which drives them. I do not need to tell you, doctor, that labor must bear the burdens of the State. Labor at last pays all and capital pays nothing—all burdens of government, all expenses of courts and juries, and prisons and police, all cost of armies and navies. The diamonds which glitter upon the shirt front of the purchased legislator, the wine which hisses down the throat of the lobbyist, the steel doors and locks which guard watered stock and stolen bonds, the very powder and bullets which shoot out the life of maddened and insurgent labor, are all paid for out of the toil of the laborer.”
“While there is much truth in what you say, professor,” observed the doctor, “yet where is the immediate necessity for you to work yourself into such a state of mind about it?”
“Your remark, doctor, is a representative one,” replied Professor Thornton, “and the general indifference which it expresses is the most discouraging feature of the existing situation. Like the villagers who cultivate their vineyards at the base of Vesuvius, we heed not the rumblings of the volcano. Like the citizens long resident in Cologne, we scent the tainted air without discomfort. We cry with the French king, ‘After us the deluge,’ and we seem to care very little what may happen so long as it shall not happen to us.”
“There is the mate to your pickerel,” said the doctor, as he landed a fish upon the grass at his feet. “Two of the millionaires of Nine Mile Pond have succumbed to their own greed and the patience and cunning of intelligent labor.”