Such holocausts of frankness and decency are certainly not rare in American politics; on the contrary, they glow with normalcy. The typical legislative situation among us--and the typical administrative situation as well--is one in which men wholly devoid of inner integrity, facing a minority that is resolutely determined to get its will, yield up their ideas, their freedom, and their honour in order to save their jobs. I say administrative situation as well; what I mean is that in these later days the pusillanimity of the actual law-maker is fully matched by the pusillanimity of the enforcing officer, whether humble assistant district attorney or powerful judge. The war, with its obliteration of customary pretences and loosening of fundamental forces, threw up the whole process into high relief. For nearly two long years there was a complete abandonment of sense and self-respect. Rowelled and intimidated by minorities that finally coalesced into a frantic majority, legislators allowed themselves to be forced into imbecility after imbecility, and administrative officers, including some of the highest judges in the land, followed them helter-skelter. In the lower house of Congress there was one man--already forgotten--who showed the stature of a man. He resigned his seat and went home to his self-respect. The rest had no self-respect to go home to. Eager beyond all to hold their places, at whatever cost to principle, and uneasily conscious of their vulnerability to attack, however frenzied and unjust, they surrendered abjectly and repeatedly--to the White House, to the newspapers, to any group enterprising enough to issue orders to them and resolute enough to flourish weapons before them. It was a spectacle full of indecency--there are even congressmen who blush when they think of it to-day--but it was nevertheless a spectacle that was typical. The fortunes of politics, as they now run, make it overwhelmingly probable that every new recruit to public office will be just such a poltroon. The odds are enormously in favour of him, and enormously against the man of honour. Such a man of honour may occasionally drift in, taken almost unawares by some political accident, but it is the pushing, bumptious, unconscionable bounder who is constantly _fighting_ to get in, and only too often he succeeds. The rules of the game are made to fit his taste and his talents. He can survive as a hog can survive in the swill-yard.