A similar process was used by the politicians and agitator’s on both sides of the negro slavery question. There was the unreasoning vote to be captured. Each candidate for Congress, instead of desiring the matter amicably settled, wished rather to use the dispute as a means for his own election. Now, it is a fact well known to politicians that it is impossible to get all the voters to the polls at any election. Besides securing the floaters by means of agents with cash and shrewdness, the best way to induce the remaining nondescripts and light weights to take the trouble to vote, is to create artificial excitement by means of meetings, processions, bands of music and inflammatory oratory. The opposite side and their leaders must be denounced as fools, humbugs, liars, scamps, thieves and traitors. The wisest are repelled by this course, but they are a minority in every community. Besides, some of the men who know better than to believe an unscrupulous demagogue, will vote for him, partly out of gratitude because he has amused them by his attacks on his opponents, partly because he is the party candidate, and partly as the result of a sort of mental contagion. Now, it was this campaign of inflammatory denunciation; this output of lies, slanders and vilification indulged in by the platform talkers on all sides in the political campaigns of 1856, 1858 and 1860 that brought on the Civil War. This is well known; but what is not known and never will be known is just how much of this rascally oratory was hired and paid for in cold cash contributed by that class of people who always contribute to election funds. And this brutal and stupid process is the natural and inevitable result of an attempt to decide important political questions by manhood suffrage, that is by a public agitation undertaken to obtain the votes of the most thoughtless, careless, dull and unreasonable men of the country.