What I plead for, if I may borrow a term in disrepute, is simply _Realpolitik_, _i. e._, realism in politics. I can imagine a political campaign purged of all the current false assumptions and false pretenses--a campaign in which, on election day, the voters went to the polls clearly informed that the choice between them was not between an angel and a devil, a good man and a bad man, an altruist and a go-getter, but between two frank go-getters, the one, perhaps, excelling at beautiful and nonsensical words and the other at silent and prehensile deeds--the one a chautauqua orator and the other a porch-climber. There would be, in that choice, something candid, free and exhilarating. Buncombe would be adjourned. The voter would make his selection in the full knowledge of all the facts, as he makes his selection between two heads of cabbage, or two evening papers, or two brands of chewing tobacco. Today he chooses his rulers as he buys bootleg whiskey, never knowing precisely what he is getting, only certain that it is not what it pretends to be. The Scotch may turn out to be wood alcohol or it may turn out to be gasoline; in either case it is not Scotch. How much better if it were plainly labelled, for wood alcohol and gasoline both have their uses--higher uses, indeed, than Scotch. The danger is that the swindled and poisoned consumer, despairing of ever avoiding them when he doesn’t want them, may prohibit them even when he does want them, and actually enforce his own prohibition. The danger is that the hopeless voter, forever victimized by his false assumption about politicians, may in the end gather such ferocious indignation that he will abolish them teetotally and at one insane swoop, and so cause government by the people, for the people and with the people to perish from this earth. VII. FROM A CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK 1 _Progress_ The most important change that has come over American literature in my time is this: that American satire, which once aimed all of its shafts at the relatively civilized minority, now aims most of them at the imbecile majority. If a satirist of today undertook to poke fun at the paintings of Titian and the music of Richard Wagner, he would be dismissed at once as a clown strayed in from the barber-shop weeklies and the chautauquas. Yet Mark Twain did both, and to great applause. To Mark, for all his humor, there was little that was ridiculous in such American go-getters as George F. Babbitt. He looked upon one of them, Henry H. Rogers, as his best friend, and he made another the hero of “A Connecticut Yankee.” What amused Mark most profoundly was precisely whatever was most worthy of sober admiration--sound art, good manners, the aristocratic ideal. And he was typical of his age. The satirists of the present age, though they may be less accomplished workmen, are at all events more civilized men. What they make fun of is not what is dignified, or noble, or beautiful, but what is shoddy, and ignoble, and ugly.