“I come before you to-day as a Republican of the Republican banner county of this great state of ours. From snowy Shasta on the north to sunny San Diego on the south; from the west, where the waves of the Pacific look upon our shores, to where the barriers of the great Sierras stand clad in eternal snow, there is no more loyal county to the Republican party in this state than the county from which I hail. Its loyalty to the party has been tested on many fields of battle and it has never wavered in the contest. Wherever the fate of battle was trembling in the balance Alameda county stepped into the breach and rescued the Republican party from defeat.” Translated into English, this military mouthing would read somewhat like this: “I live in Alameda county, where the Republicans have uniformly outvoted the Democrats.” The orators at the Democratic convention a week earlier had been no better and no different. Their rhetorical stock-in-trade was the same old shop-worn figures of speech in which their predecessors have dealt for ages, and in which their successors will traffic to the end of—well, to the end of that imitative quality in the national character, which, by its superior intensity, serves to distinguish us from the apes that perish. III “What we most need, to secure honest elections,” says a well-meaning reformer, “is the voting machine.” Why, truly, here is a hopeful spirit—a rare and radiant intelligence suffused with the conviction that men can be made honest by machinery—that human character is a matter of gearing, ratchets and dials! One would give something to know how it feels to be like that. A mind so constituted must be happy in its hope. It lives in rapturous contemplation of a world of its own creation—a world where public morality and political good order are to be had by purchase at the machine-shop. In that delectable world, religion is superfluous; the true high priest is the mechanical engineer; the minor clergy are the village blacksmiths. It is rather a pity that so fine and fair a sphere should swim only in the attenuated ether of a simpleton’s misunderstanding. The voting-machines are doubtless well enough; they save labor and enable the statesmen of the street to know the result within a few minutes of the closing of the polls—whereby many are spared to their country who would otherwise incur fatal disorders by exposure to the night air while assisting in awaiting the returns. But a voting-machine that human ingenuity can not pervert, human ingenuity can not invent. Honesty has no monopoly of inspiration.