The public officials of this favored country, Heaven be thanked, are infrequently slandered: they are, as a rule, so bad that calumniation is a compliment. Our best men, with here and there an exception, have been driven out of public life, or made afraid to enter it. Even our spasmodic efforts at reform fail ludicrously for lack of leaders unaffiliated with “the thing to be reformed.” Unless attracted by the salary, why should a gentleman “aspire” to the presidency of the United States? During his canvass (and he is expected to “run,” not merely to “stand”) he will have from his own party a support that should make him blush, and from all the others an opposition that will stick at nothing to accomplish his satisfactory defamation. After his election his partition and allotment of the loaves and fishes will estrange an important and thenceforth implacable faction of his following without appeasing the animosity of any one else. At the finish of his term the utmost that he can expect in the way of reward not expressible in terms of the national currency is that not much more than one-half of his countrymen will believe him a scoundrel to the end of their days. VII The trend of political thought and action in all civilized countries toward absolute Socialism is so conspicuous a phenomenon that it not only impresses that rare and execrated intelligence, the impartial observer, “the looker-on at the game,” but is seen with greater or less distinctness by the innumerable company of players. A political faith is a kind of mental disability; the patient dimly discerns some of the more salient of the “opposing facts,” but those grateful to his disorder loom large indeed. The proposition that the established order of things is in peril, has, therefore, both a stammering and a stentorian assent and needs no proof. Whether that is for better or for worse is not to be answered in an epigram, nor in a paragraph, but from the viewpoint of the looker-on with no more than an observer’s interest in the matter, little is seen to encourage the optimist—little even of the little that he requires. Down to date the world never has had good government. For forms of government fools have contested from the dawn of history, but no form has given good and wise administration. Government is like medicine; those who administer it are, as a rule, wiser than those to whom it is administered, though not much. In point of conscience there is little to choose between them.