In my judgment, this entire incident of the President’s “tour” was discreditable to President and people. I do not go into the question of his motive in making it. Be that what it may, the manner of it seems to me an outrage upon all the principles and sentiments underlying republican institutions. In all but the name it was a “royal progress”—the same costly ostentation, the same civic and military pomp, the same solemn and senseless adulation, the same abasement of spirit of the Many before the One. According to republican traditions ten thousand times a year affirmed in every way in which affirmation is possible, we fondly persuade ourselves that we hold as a true faith in the hearts of our hearts that the One is the servant of the Many! And it is no mere political catchphrase: he _is_ their servant; he _is_ their creature; all that in him to which they grovel (dignifying and justifying their instinctive and inherited servility by names as false as anything in ceremonial imposture) they themselves have made, as truly as the heathen has made the wooden god before which he performs his unmanly rite. It is precisely this thing—the superiority of the people to their servants—that constitutes, and was by our fathers understood to constitute, the essential, fundamental difference between the system which they uprooted and the one which they planted in its stead. Deluded men! how little they guessed the length and strength and vitality of the roots left in the soil of the centuries when the noxious harvestage had been cast as rubbish to the void!