With such political leaders as these men, and with the finest intellect and character of the Old South devoted for generations to the study and exposition of the purest party politics, I am not surprised at the higher level of parties and platforms of the Old South. Politics was not a “graft,” as the present-day political ringster defines it. The political and personal conscience were one and the same, and a man’s politics was no small part of his religion. I am not saying that all political leaders were incorruptible statesmen, or that an unselfish patriotism was the invariable mark of its party politics. The demagogue was not unknown, and the fine Italian hand of the mercenary was sometimes in evidence. But of one fact I am abundantly assured—the spoilsman and the grafter held no recognized and official standing in that old-time democracy. Men of ability and character might aspire to political place and honor. They might even go beyond the personal desire and become open candidates for party favor. But the service of the paid political manager, the conciliation of the party “boss,” the subsidizing of the party “heelers,” the utilization of the party press in flaming, self-laudatory columns and even pages of paid advertising matter, _ad nauseam_ and _ad infinitum_, as in recent Southern political contests—all these latter-day importations and inventions of “peanut” politics would have merited and received the unmeasured contempt of the politicians of the Old South. There were certain old-fashioned political maxims that constituted the code of every man who would become a candidate for office, as, for instance, “The office should seek the man, not the man the office.” I cannot find heart to censure the politician of the New South for his smile at the verdancy and guilelessness of such a maxim, but that which provokes a smile was in my own remembered years the working motto of the old-time Southern leaders of high rank. Another maxim was that “the patriot may impoverish but not enrich himself by office-holding.” As a commentary upon this maxim, it affords me infinite satisfaction, in a retrospect of the long line of men who led the great political campaigns of the Old South and held its positions of highest trust, that most of them died poor, that none of them within my knowledge were charged with converting public office into private gain, and that the highest ambition of the old-time politician was to serve his country by some great deed of unselfish patriotism, to live like a gentleman, and then to die with uncorrupted heart and hands, and with money enough to insure a decent burial. If he left a few debts here and there, they were gratefully cherished as souvenirs by his host of friends.