Imagine a tea-party of pre-Raphaelites discussing Dante; they dote on his style, his passion, his force, his quality. In walks Dante, grim, remorseless, harsh, powerful. The man represents everything they hate. He is a horror and an outrage. The whole region of literature that these men live in is not more fictitious than the region of political thought in which the effete American--I mean your banker, your college president, your writer of editorial leaders--lives. Exclude for the moment those who are financially corrupt and consider only the men of intellect, and in all that concerns politics they are as removed from real ideas as Rossetti was removed from the real Dante. Imagine a company of people on a voyage. They play whist with one another for dimes, and they spend all their money on the steward and continue to play with counters, and the ship goes to wreck, and they sit on the beach and continue to play with pebbles. That is American politics. The whole thing is one gigantic sham, one transcendent fraud. It makes no difference which man is made president; it makes no difference which is governor. There is no choice between McKinley and Bryan, between Republicanism and Democracy. There is no difference between them. They are one thing. They both and all of them are part of the machinery by which the government of a most dishonest nation is carried on, for the financial benefit of certain parties,--certain thousands of men who have bank accounts and eat and drink and bring up their families on the proceeds of this complicated swindle.