If you look at the work of the anti-slavery people by the light of what they were trying to do, you will find that they had a very clear understanding of their task. The reason of some of them canted a little from the strain and stress; but they were so much nearer being right-minded than their contemporaries that we may claim them as respectable human beings. They were the rock on which the old politics split. They were a new force. As soon as they had gathered head enough to affect political issues, they broke every public man at the North by forcing him to take sides. There is not a man of the era whom they did not shatter. Finally their own leaders got into public life, and it was not till then that the new era began. The same thing is happening to-day. It is the function of the reformer to crack up any public man who dodges the issue of corruption, or who tries to ride two horses by remaining a straight party man and shouting reform. This is no one’s fault. It is a natural process. It is fate. Some fall on one side of the line, and some on the other. One gets the office, and the next loses it; but oblivion yawns for all of them. There is no cassia that can embalm their deeds; they can do nothing interesting, nothing that it lies in the power of the human mind to remember. Why is it that Calhoun’s Speeches are unreadable? He had the earnestness of a prophet and the strength almost of a Titan; but he was engaged in framing a philosophy to protect an interest. He was maintaining something that was not true. It was a fallacy. It was a pretence. It was a house built on the sands of temporary conditions. Such are the ideas of those middling good men, who profess honesty in just that degree which will keep them in office. Honesty beyond this point is, in their philosophy, incompatible with earthly conditions. These men must exist at present. They are an organic product of the times; they are samples of mediocrity. But they have nothing to offer to the curiosity of the next generation. No, not though their talent was employed in protecting an Empire--as it is now employed in eking out the supremacy of a disease in a country whose deeper health is beginning to throw the poison off. Our public men are confronted with two systems of politics. They cannot hedge. If the question were suddenly to be lost in a riot, no doubt a good administrator might win applause, even a Tammany chief. But we have no riots. We have finished the war with Spain, and, unless foreign complications shall set in, we are about to sit down with the politicians over our domestic issue--theft. Are you for theft or against it? You can’t be both; and your conversation, the views you hold and express to your friends, are the test. It is only because politics affect or reflect these views that politics have any importance at all. Your agents--Croker, Hanna--are serving you faithfully now. Nothing else is to be heard at the clubs but the sound of little hammers riveting abuse.