It is by their estimate of the chances of what the party _will_ do that independent voters will be guided in their action. It is of no use to tell them what it used to be, nor, when they resent its corruption, to say that things were as bad a hundred years ago. We had hoped the world was growing better. We would rather not need to be consoled than to have the finest consolation that was ever manufactured out of the commonplaces of history. At least I had hoped that we should never hear of poor old Judas again, whose conduct, if it be an argument for anything, would go to prove that one man in every twelve _must_ be a knave. When our knaves follow the example of Judas by going straightway and hanging themselves, I shall not object to the recalling of his example from time to time. What we have to do is to purify the party ourselves, and this we can do only by insisting that the men who are offered for our choice shall be men of a character so well established that they are above suspicion and incapable of temptation, at least in its baser forms; we must insist on having such men, or acknowledge that our system of popular government has left us none such. “It is said that the Republican party cannot be reformed from within. This may or may not be so, but is this less true of the Democratic party? The first printed ballot I ever saw was in Baltimore just fifty years ago, and I remember that it had upon it an American flag and ‘Hurrah for Old Hickory!’ That ‘Hurrah for Old Hickory’ introduced into our civil service that evil system which has led to all the corruption in our administration, and which, if not cured, will lead to the failure of our democratical experiment. Many people seem to think that some such divinity doth hedge a Democracy as was once supposed to hedge a king. But perpetual motion is as idle a dream in political organization as in mechanics. It is in the little wheels, in those least obvious to inspection, that the derangement is likely to begin. Are we to expect more vigilance from what used to be called the Jacksonian Democracy? I must be allowed to doubt it. “But suppose that I am mistaken, suppose that the pretensions of the two parties as to their zeal for reforms in the Civil Service are entitled to equal weight, there are other questions to which the answer is by no means clear. How is it about honest money? about an unmercurial currency that shall not rise and fall with the temperature of Wall Street, that shall neither tempt the would-be rich to unsafe speculation nor cheat the poor of their earnings? Though neither party has been so explicit as I should think it wise to be, yet I believe our chance is on the whole better with the Republicans than with their opponents.