And more than all, they saw that in the amazing superstition of party regularity by which the partizan mind in that day was obsessed, they were voting for these interests no matter which ticket they supported, for the machine was not only partizan, it was bipartizan, and the great conflict they waged at the polls was the most absurd sham battle that ever was fought. It seems almost incredible now that men’s minds were ever so clouded, strange that they did not earlier discover how absurd was a system which, in order to enable them the more readily to subjugate themselves, actually printed little wood-cuts of birds--roosters and eagles--at the heads of the tickets, so that they might the more easily and readily recognize their masters and deliver their suffrages over to them. It is an absurdity that is pretty well recognized in this country to-day, and the principle of separating municipal politics from national politics is all but established in law. Mr. James Bryce had pointed it out long before, but Jones seemed to be almost the first among us to recognize it, and he probably had not read from Mr. Bryce; he deduced the principle from his own experience, and from his own consciousness, if not his own conscience, perhaps he had some intimation of it from the Genius of These States, whose scornful laugh at that and other absurdities his great exemplar Walt Whitman could hear, echoed as from some mountain peak afar in the west. But it was no laughing matter in Toledo in those days. Men were accused of treason and sedition for deserting their parties; it made little difference which party a man belonged to; the insistence was on his belonging to a party; any party would suffice.